Author: Lesley Young

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

HM Dessert Lounge and Miss Sandie’s Gluten-Free Baked Goods

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

There’s nothing like a little competition to get the creative juices flowing. Or the entrepreneurial spirit engaged.

For the Mosleys, their creativity centers around cooking, and lucky for Memphians, they’re very, very competitive about it.

Back in 2010, the husband and wife duo, Casscius and Fran, decided to have a bake-off on Thanksgiving Eve and let their friends and family serve as judges.

Everyone had so much fun, and the food was so good, they did it the next year, and the next, until they outgrew their house and were forced to rent a venue to host what they named Sweet Cafe.

“We thought, ‘Hmmm, maybe we have a business here,'” Fran says.

Justin Fox Burks

HM Dessert Lounge

That business emerged as the HM Dessert Lounge, a dessert bar on Madison that most definitely serves desserts, as well as a compelling collection of savory specials, such as cornbread waffles with pot roast or their signature Beale Street soup, with shrimp, andouille sausage, greens, and tomatoes.

“We take soulful food and do something different with it,” Fran says.

The desserts, well, let’s just say I had to take a moment after trying the Chocolate Temptation — a chocolate brownie with warm chocolate fudge, chocolate chips, Heath Bar crumbles, vanilla ice cream, and whipped cream, served in a martini glass. I never leave a trace that there was chocolate on my plate, or glass, but I could. Not. Finish.

Justin Fox Burks

Desserts average around $8, and on Fridays, they offer gourmet personal pan pizzas for $10, or for $16.50 you can add a salad and dessert, like banana pudding cheesecake.

The Mosleys host various events, including the upcoming the HM Love Jones weekend that will include entertainment on Valentine’s Eve and a four-course private dinner on Valentine’s Day.

They host a Women’s Empowerment Night and offer their walls to local artists.

“I’m really pleased with the direction we’re headed. We’ve grown into more than a dessert lounge,” Fran says.

Go in there on a day when the competition is high. You could end up choosing between chocolate bacon bread pudding with a caramel rum sauce, prepared by Casscius, or lemon pound cake with lemon glaze ice cream, whipped up by Fran.

“I totally gave him the credit for that, but, well, everyone was really liking the lemon pound cake,” Fran says.

“She had no business baking that day. She should have let me have my glory,” Casscius says. “I’m 0 and six, but I’m not giving up.”

Sandie Whittington was always a little sickly.

A rash here, a headache there, and never quite operating on all cylinders.

Then she read an article about food allergies, particularly gluten sensitivity, and she booked an appointment with her doctor.

“I hit the jackpot,” Whittington says. “Oats, yeast, barley, gluten. I had it all.”

She cut gluten out of her diet, and within two weeks “it was a whole new world.”

Her discovery motivated her to get creative, especially when it came to sweets, because a world without gluten can be especially challenging.

“I started researching ways I could have desserts and sweets. There are not many gluten-free products,” she says.

She started passing out her confections to her friends and family, and the feedback was consistent — she should start a business.

Finally, after 13 years of hearing their suggestions, and once she had some time off last summer from teaching high school, the English teacher started Miss Sandie’s Gluten-Free Baked Goods.

Whittington offers four kinds of cookies so far — peanut butter, peanut butter chocolate chip, peanut butter butterscotch and chocolate chip morsel, and oatmeal cranberry dark chocolate.

“That’s a big seller,” she says. “I use Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Oats. A lot of stuff can be cross-contaminated, so I spend the extra money on gluten-free oats.”

She says she uses no flour, not even gluten-free flour.

“I say my stuff is pretty darn pure,” she says.

Her products can be found at Miss Cordelia’s and High Point Grocery, and will be offered at the new Curb Market in the old Easy-Way on Cooper, set to open soon.

“I plan on having my cookies in other stores soon,” she says.

She also offers seasonal breads, including the banana nut bread that recently replaced her pumpkin bread for the season, and will do personal orders from time to time.

Whittington says all of her baked goods are made with six to nine ingredients, which are listed on every label.

“There are no preservatives whatsoever. So many products you find at the store that are gluten-free have a list of ingredients that’s a mile long, and that is just not good for you,” she says.

“Everyone says that it’s good. I feel like it’s a service to the community.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Now open: Fino’s East and Buntyn Corner Cafe

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Every week, Jerry Wilson Jr. would go to Fino’s from the Hill for his fix and to mention to the owner, Joanne Johnson, his business plan for her — to open a location out East.

And every week, Johnson’s — maiden name Finocchiarro, hence the name Fino’s, pronounced “Fihnnoh’s” — response was a firm no.

“She was like, ‘Hell no,'” Wilson says.

For almost a decade.

Until one day she caught Wilson off guard and offered to sell him the business.

“I was like, ‘What? Really?'” Wilson says. “She was 62 years old and had a new grandkid, and she wanted to play with her grandkid.”

So on November 3, 2009, Wilson walked into the eatery on Madison not as a customer but as the owner, and he began to work on that longtime running joke about expanding eastward.

“I had a five-year payoff for my loan, and I knew I probably had no chance to do it before the five years from a cash-flow standpoint,” he says. “I would mention it to my employees, and they would roll their eyes.”

Eventually, Wilson could call himself debt-free — for 20 days, because sometime in there he saw a building for sale on Brookhaven Circle, nestled between Hog & Hominy and Brookhaven Pub & Grill, and knew his opportunity had arrived.

After months of measuring, drawing up design plans, and negotiating with the bank, Wilson is happily in debt again, and he no longer has anyone telling him no nor rolling their eyes at him.

As of December 7, 2015, there are now two Fino’s from the Hill, Fino’s Midtown at 1853 Madison and Fino’s East at 703 W. Brookhaven Circle.

Justin Fox Burks

Spreading the love

Justin Fox Burks

The new location seats close to 100 and offers the same addictive menu, with its sandwiches that use fresh baguettes made from La Baguette, its homemade olive tapenade, and its tomato and onion dressing. The only difference is that the East location offers the favorite chickpea salad as a side and a cup of soup as an option.

Wilson hopes to reconfigure the smaller kitchen in Midtown so that he can offer those choices at the original location as well, and he plans on discontinuing the Italian grocery items that inspired the opening of the business in the first place.

“Joanne’s grandparents were from Sicily, and she lived in St. Louis on the Hill. When she moved to Memphis, she had nowhere to buy authentic Italian groceries, so she started Fino’s Italian Grocery and Deli 20 years ago,” Wilson says. “She started doing prepared foods, and that morphed into a deli, and we now have simple food that’s fast, inexpensive, and quality.”

Fino’s East is open Monday through Friday, 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Fino’s East, 703 W. Brookhaven Circle, 334-4454, finosmemphis.com/finos-east

For the past 13 years Mike Wiggins has been driving the streets of Memphis, minding his own business, and been pulled over by other drivers, not because of road rage, but because they wanted to know if they were ever going to taste those special yeast rolls again.

“This one guy pulled me over, and I thought my truck was on fire. He told me he used to come in Buntyn Restaurant, and he loved our rolls and wanted to know if we were ever going to reopen,” Wiggins says.

Wiggins took over the established restaurant from his parents in 1995, who had taken it over from Wiggins’ grandfather in the ’70s, who had taken it over from Wiggins’ uncle in the ’60s, who had opened it in 1946.

He decided to move the restaurant in 2001 just before September 11th, and he was never able to recover from the financial hit. So he closed the doors in 2002 and worked on paying off his debt.

By 2013 he was debt-free again, and he kept his eyes and ears open for an opportunity to be able to answer his fellow commuters when they interrupted his driving with an appeasing yes.

What he found was a former deli in the iBank building at 5050 Poplar which he now calls Buntyn Corner Cafe.

“I renamed it to make people think before they walked in the door that it’s different,” Wiggins says. “So that when they say, ‘Give me your old fried chicken,’ they don’t get mad because I don’t have it.”

The new location is smaller, seating close to 30, and doesn’t allow space for fryers. The other staples such as chicken and dressing, daily specials, the beef and vegetable soup, cobbler, banana pudding, and, most importantly, those yeast rolls make up for what’s missing.

Since opening his doors in early November, Wiggins has seen close to 3,000 customers come through his doors, including Memphis’ resident king, Jerry Lawler, and well-known restaurateurs.

He’s kept much of the old decor, with photos dating back to the ’40s, the old Buntyn Restaurant sign, and a couple of mementos, including a chair decorated with a Rufus Thomas “Funky Chicken” theme.

“He used to do the Funky Chicken before he sat down,” Wiggins says.

“It’s small, but it’s a lot of fun,” he says. “I’ve always worked in the restaurant, even for my grandfather. I worked 11 years to pay off my debt so that I could find something and reopen.”

Buntyn’s hours are Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., serving breakfast and lunch.

Buntyn Corner Cafe, 5050 Poplar, Suite 107, 424-3286, buntyncornercafe.com

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Artist Vodka for the creative types; Buster’s expands.

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

There’s an old saying, “What rhymes with Friday? Vodka.” And, folks, there’s a new sheriff in town. Or right outside of town. In Oxford.

Artist Vodka, made by Old Venice restaurateur and Oxford resident Jim Bulian, hit the shelves a year ago and is doing its darndest to make sure that old saying rings true.

Its slogan is “The art is in the party,” and it’s making the rounds to parties across the continent with its business plan to pair up with artists and act as their vodka-in-residence.

“We promote their work, and they promote our product,” Bulian, also an artist, says.

So far, the wheat-based vodka label has paired up with close to a half dozen artists, including painter Jeremy Lipking, novelist Ace Atkins, and jazz musician Ray Angry, and is looking to add more to the Artist Vodka Collective.

“We do pourings and tastings. We just did one at an art gallery in Culver City for Susan Carter Hall,” Bulian says.

Bulian also makes his product available to film producers for product placement purposes, an idea that sparked from a run-in with Alison Eastwood, i.e. Clint Eastwood’s daughter.

“I bumped into her at a dinner party. Our vodka is organic, and she loves anything organic, so I gave her a taste, and she asked if I would like to do a product placement in her film,” Bulian says.

Speaking of organic, the Italian farro wheat that Bulian imports from Europe is USDA certified organic. He uses water from Lake Stevens in the Cascade mountain range in Washington and the old world Russian distillation method in a copper kettle.

“Lake Stevens gets 200 inches of rainfall a year and 200 inches of snowfall, so the water is fresh and perfectly pH balanced, and you get this really clean and soft taste,” Bulian says. “We have yet to lose a taste test, and we’ve gone up against them all. We are 22 and 0.”

So far Artist Vodka can be found in 45 restaurants, bars, and stores in Memphis, including Old Venice, of course, Cafe Pontotoc, Bardog, and Spirit Shop.

The website is still in launch-mode but eventually will host its Artist Collective, with bios and links for each artist it represents.

“I went through 75 different profiles to try to get it right. It’s beautiful inside, and it’s beautiful outside,” Bulian says.

Buster’s Liquors & Wines is thinking about changing its name. Again.

As the liquor laws or the drinking culture in the state of Tennessee slowly catch up with the rest of the country, or at least the less absurd areas, the 60-plus-year-old retail institution continues to evolve, and so does its name.

First it added the “& Wines” part as wine became more en vogue in the ’80s and ’90s. Next up is either adding a comma, moving the ampersand, and adding “Beer,” or a similar configuration but with the word “More.”

That’s because Buster’s definitely has beer now, and it has lots of more.

The store recently added 6,000 square feet to its existing 10,000, paying particular attention to making sure the beer nerds (cerevisaphiles?) of the Mid-South are properly slaked.

They now carry more than 500 beers stocked behind 14 cooler doors, and they launched Memphis’ only Pegas growler system, which uses a pressurized environment and CO2, pumping out oxygen to keep the growler fresh for several weeks.

“It’s a state-of-the-art system,” Buster’s president and co-owner, Josh Hammond, says. “Used to you would have to drink it in a few days. Now it can stay fresh for two months until you decide to open it.”

They plan on rotating their eight taps regularly, concentrating on local brews, one-offs, and insider-knowledge beers made outside the state.

Because the Wine in Grocery Stores law, or WIGS, works both ways, Buster’s also added edibles to their well-stocked shelves.

They offer Boar’s Head sausages and packaged sliced meats, the Good Ham Company hams, 50-plus varieties of specialty cheeses, olive oils, Felicia Willett’s Flo’s products, Judy Pound Cakes, Shotwell candies, Papi Joe’s Bloody Mary mix, plus a nice selection of accessories, from stemware to gift bags.

The expansion also gave the store room to spread out a little, with wider aisles, a more roomy register, and the space for tasting desks, where they plan to hold weekend tastings on a regular basis.

“Our grand opening [in early December] was awesome. I would be waiting on a customer, showing them all the new stuff, and they would be sampling something, then I would look up a couple of hours later, and they were still there,” Hammond says. “That’s the kind of experience we want to give.

“That’s where the industry’s headed, and we’re definitely raising the bar.”

Categories
News News Feature

Memphis Noir: from Dames to Graceland.

By June 2013, Laureen Cantwell had lived in Memphis for a year — long enough to have fallen in love with Elvis (“I went to Graceland twice with the VIP pass, and I cried both times”), long enough to recognize the city’s selfdom, and long enough to notice a glaring omission on the part of Akashic Books Noir series.

“[They had] a Detroit Noir, Chicago, New Orleans. There was a Tel Aviv Noir. But no Memphis Noir. It was sort of surprising,” Cantwell says.

She found it no coincidence that she ran into the publishing company’s booth at an annual library conference that summer, so she emboldened herself to ask about the oversight.

The answer was simple enough.

“They told me they had not had the right proposal,” Cantwell says.

A business card exchange and a Labor Day later, the idea of producing an anthology recounting the Memphis experience through the noir lens was in the hands of team Akashic, and so began Cantwell’s journey of overseeing her first anthology.

Brooklyn-based Akashic Books was launched in 1997 by three musicians as an independent publishing company to “reverse the gentrification of the literary world.”

In 2004 the company released its first Noir book, Brooklyn Noir, 19 stories using death, revolvers, stalkers, and squatters to showcase the diversity and personality of the New York borough.

“In a sense they’re like a travel guide, perhaps in a creepy kind of way, and perhaps that will compel people to go and visit that place,” Cantwell says. “Akashic is very selective in their projects, and they really believe in the author or story or product they’re putting out.”

There are 72 Noir books, with 18 forthcoming, ranging from Tehran to Trinidad, and as of November 3rd, a Memphis edition will be added to the roster.

Cantwell started her process with a 2001 Flyer article that described the somewhat disjunctive writers’ scene in Memphis.

She contacted some of the writers, who put her in touch with other writers, and eventually she had 30 submissions on her hands.

Through her newfound connection with the River City writers’ sphere, she also came upon a coeditor — Leonard Gill.

“She called me out of the blue. When she proposed it to me, I thought, ‘Why not Memphis, indeed,'” Gill, longtime book columnist for the Flyer and Memphis magazine, says.

“He and I gelled very quickly. We seemed to have the same ideals and perspective on the project and what we wanted to produce,” Cantwell says.

After many dinners and coffees and discussions and possibly a little gnashing of teeth, the two settled on 15 stories. The Brooklyn offices had requested 14.

“We were hoping that they would agree that No. 15 was so good, they couldn’t produce the anthology without it,” Cantwell says.

Not only did Akashic include the 15th entry, they chose the publisher’s birthday to release it.

“That’s a high compliment,” Cantwell says.

Memphis Noir covers train cars and Beale Street, hoodoo and segregation, Nathan Bedford Forrest and, of course, Graceland, and even includes a graphic novella, the only one in the series.

“I didn’t know much about noir except for the movies I’d seen. I knew there had to be a dead body and a dame and a lot of drinking,” Richard Alley, who contributed “The Panama Limited,” says.

Veteran Noir contributor and writer Cary Holladay says she was delighted to participate in the project.

“Memphis literally has stories growing on trees. Every day, I hear about or read about or find myself involved in … stories that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are not too strange to happen but are much too strange to believe,” Holladay says. “Memphis is quirky and feral. It should have its own entire series.”

Gill says readers will be as impressed as he was with the outcome.

“Memphis should be proud. The collection was beyond my expectations, and I couldn’t be happier with it,” Gill says.

A launch party will take place at Crosstown Art’s story booth, 438 N. Cleveland, on Tuesday, Nov. 3rd. Sponsored by the Booksellers at Laurelwood, it starts at

6 p.m. and includes a Q-and-A and signings with several of the writers.

For more information, visit akashicbooks.com.

Categories
Book Features Books

Cormac McCarthy conference comes to Memphis

Cormac McCarthy was 32 when he published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. He has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize, among other fellowships, awards, and recognitions, and has garnered a cortege of devotees, from the lay reader to the fellow prize-winning author, that could be defined as a veritable phenomenon.

In 1993, close to a year after the publication of McCarthy’s sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses, which became a New York Times best-seller seemingly overnight, a faction of those disciples gathered at Bellarmine University in Kentucky to discourse about this author who had irreversibly bewitched readers across the globe. That assembly resulted in an (almost) annual international conference as well as the Cormac McCarthy Society, which co-hosts other mini-conferences, fields papers, and assists with the publication of journals on all things McCarthy, mostly through their website cormacmccarthy.com.

For the 50th anniversary of McCarthy’s first novel, the society decided to host the 2015 conference in Memphis. This Thursday, October 8th, through Saturday, October 10th, hundreds of fans from all over the world will convene on the campus of the University of Memphis to celebrate one of the world’s greatest living authors.

“It seems like an eyeblink that we’ve gone from pulling our teeth to find a place for our first conference. It was just by a stroke of luck that we were able to go to Bellarmine. Now we field calls from universities all over the world asking would we like to hold the conference there,” Society Secretary and co-founder Rick Wallach says.

They settled on Memphis by way of Knoxville, where McCarthy grew up most of his life and lived many years and where the society has hosted numerous previous conferences. The Orchard Keeper as well as his other early novels take place in and around Knoxville.

“This is a rare opportunity where scholars from all over the world will come to Memphis, and it is a chance for our students and faculty to hear some of the most interesting and current ideas going on in literature,” Dr. Jeffrey Scraba, associate professor and director of graduate studies at the U of M, says.

Conference planners designate a theme each year, and while this year’s conference centers around The Orchard Keeper, panel topics will cover a variety of works and motifs, such as ecotheology, the aesthetics of violence, and teaching McCarthy in high school.

McCarthy has published 10 novels, two plays, and three screenplays. All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road have been adapted for the screen, with No Country taking home four Academy Awards, and his screenplay The Counselor was released in 2013 and was directed by Ridley Scott.

Trying to synopsize McCarthy’s prose is as absurd an idea as the fetus trees and necrophiliacs he chronicles in his “venomous fiction” (as described in his interview with The New York Times in 1992, one of only two interviews ever granted by McCarthy in his 50 years of publishing, the other given to, of course, Oprah Winfrey).

“Cormac McCarthy is an enormous vacuum cleaner. He’s the most synoptic, eclectic, synthetic representation of American fiction there has ever been,” Wallach says. “Blood Meridian is a parody of the literary style that was popular in the mid-19th century, the penny dreadful, mostly cowboy gunslinger stories. He takes all of that and then moves through traditional Southern writing like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and Walker Percy, and it all goes into a blender and comes out as distinctly Cormac McCarthy.”

Just as his his style and subjects are vast and varied (yet distinct), so are the presenters for and attendees to the conference, who come from across the globe and range from professors and students to doctors and lawyers to carpenters and stockbrokers.

“McCarthy conferences are very nurturing. They’re also supporting the next generation of scholars. A lot of academic organizations are very hermetic, but ours is an attitude of inclusiveness. We don’t think a writer like McCarthy with such enormous stature should be the private property of the ivory tower. We invite all to attend,” Wallach says.

The public is invited to Friday night’s 7:45 dinner in the Fogelman Executive Conference Center featuring author Brian Evenson or to drop in on a panel for free. Donations are encouraged. Otherwise fees apply to attend the entire conference.

Registration for the conference will be held Thursday from 1 to 4:30 p.m. at the University Center, where the panels will also be held, and the conference concludes Saturday evening at 6:30.

For more information, visit the society’s website at cormacmccarthy.com.

Categories
News News Feature

Wandering Through New Orleans

CREDIT: Lesley Young

Parnassus: home to the Muses, sacred to Dionysus and Apollo, and generally a center of creative activity. Also known as New Orleans. Creativity is part of the air you breathe in this mythological city. The street names, the mispronunciation of street names — ride the streetcar just to listen to the conductor. Locals dedicate entire rooms to costumes in this City of Festivals. Wandering is the best way to see it. That’s when you run into the milliner or the sno-ball stand that uses Louisiana cane sugar. Wander on your bike. Just recognize that the city was built on a swamp, so there are lots and lots and lots of potholes. And don’t be alarmed by how many people talk to you — it’s a stoop city.

So how does one break it down in a city so filled with … history/bon vivance/inspiration and food? By neighborhood.

Let’s start with the Bywater. There is a strong tinge of mini-Williamsburg to the neighborhood, but this section of the Ninth Ward is mostly residential, populated with Creole cottages and shotguns, with the little coffee shop here and the little junk store there. I’m a big fan of Booty’s Street Food, a virtual global food truck fest for around $10/dish. They have “globally inspired cocktails” and, say it with me, Stumptown coffee. Slick interior with friendly staff, outdoor seating and plenty of bike racks and dog bowls, and arguably the most interesting bathroom in New Orleans — the Bywaterloo, a set of washroom galleries curated by the owner, a travel journalist. Other places to check out include Bon Castor, with locally handmade goods; Maurepas, doing the local purveyor and hand-crafted cocktail thing, and well; Satsuma, the coffee shop and juice place; and two of my all-time favorite places in New Orleans — Elizabeth’s and Bacchanal Wine. Elizabeth’s I can’t even begin to suggest something. They take all the usual suspects — po’boys, eggs Florentine, shrimp and grits — mix them up, throw in some surprises, and everything is done to exact measure. I have a romance with Bacchanal Wine. Think wine shop with an elaborate backyard of all the leafy trimmings, lit by a lone strand or two of Christmas lights, well-curated live music on a rickety stage, and affordable and divine small plates that change frequently.

Lesley Young

New Orleans is the City of Festivals.

Next, the Faubourg Marigny (pronounced FO-burg MAR-i-nee. “Faubourg” means “suburb.”) It sits next door to the Bywater and is also mostly residential with some great neighborhood establishments. Mimi’s in the Marigny was voted Best Bar in New Orleans by the Gambit. I’m pretty sure that says a lot. A two-story corner bar, Mimi’s has the hipsters and millennials and long-time locals and seersuckers and tattooed faces and artists, walls of windows, a pool table and dart board, and food. The best tapas this side of the Atlantic, in fact. Just close your eyes and point to something on the menu, and you’ll be grand. The Orange Couch is a great little coffee shop with mochi Japanese ice cream, and at one point, their Wi-Fi password was “rickjames.”

Cross Elysian Fields to the Marigny Triangle, the real entertainment district. Many say Frenchmen Street has jumped the shark. I do remember the days when reservations were not a must to get into Three Muses, my personal favorite. I had a moment there. Wandering at high tea, I heard a blind Frenchman wafting accordion music out of this little gem, where I later heard Walloonian Helen Gillet chirping French chansons and playing the cello with a loop. I cried. But it might have been the Warm Chocolate Cream Cheese Brownie. Frenchmen is still quite possibly the best place to hear the best live jazz music in the world. Wander and pop in and out of all the venues. It’s usually only a one-drink minimum. Eat at Adolfo’s, a pocket-sized place with big taste offering Italian Cajun-Creole. You’ll have to wait, but it won’t matter, because you just head downstairs to the equally small Apple Barrel for another hit of phenomenal music.

Well, folks, we’re out of space, so we’ll make our way further upriver another time. In the meantime, I’ll take one for the team and do some more research for you.

Also. Take cash. Some places require it. The musicians live off of it. And it might be someone’s birthday.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Pinehurst Artist Residency brings artists to rural Mississippi.

It’s easy to stand out among the red-and-blue-clad Ole Miss or maroon-and-white-covered Bulldog fans in Yalobusha County, especially if you’re bouncing around in a “man bun” and a bushy beard, ducking under a blanket snapping photos on an 1852 field camera. But Yalobushians don’t bat an eye at this kind of aberration.

Every July they expect to see some unusual artist out of New York exploring their particular postage stamp of the world, and maybe even participate.

That is just what the 35-year-old bearded photographer JR Larson is doing, as the participant in this year’s Pinehurst Artist Residency, a program created by former Memphian and longtime New Yorker Mary Lapides.

Larson is a Brooklyn-based multi-media artist who deals mostly in film, photography, and sculpture, and who grew up four and a half hours down the road near Picayune, Mississippi.

“I knew this part of Mississippi was different, that people interact with the land differently,” Larson, who also works as a cinematographer shooting commercials for companies like Rolls-Royce, says.

According to Lapides, “When I visited his studio in New York, I saw he had an immediate connection to the land, to location, and that he had a very spiritual side, and I said, ‘Yep.'”

Wet-plate collodion ambrotype by JR Larson

Lapides grew up in Memphis and moved to New York in 1989 as an Impressionist and modern art expert at Christie’s auction house. She launched the Pinehurst Artist Residency in 2012 as a way to pay tribute to her brother Mark Lapides, who bought a 1,100-acre farm in Coffeeville, Mississippi, to cultivate it into a pine tree farm. He died suddenly of cancer in 2009 and left the farm to Lapides and her sister. Lapides spends her summers with her husband and three children on the farm.

“I wanted to do something charitable for the community in Mark’s honor. He so appreciated this wild and beautiful part of Mississippi,” Lapides says.

Brooklynite Zefrey Throwell, 39, kicked off the residency in 2012 with his project “Everyday Awards,” in which he interviewed more than a dozen local residents and created films out of the interviews and plaques to honor their lives.

“I was walking around New York looking at all the statues honoring extremely wealthy people who most often manipulated and killed a lot of people, and I thought, Is this who we want to honor in our culture?” Throwell says.

Throwell is most recognized for his “Ocularpation: Wall Street,” in which performance artists dressed as Wall Street regulars stripped down to the nude while continuing to perform as hot dog vendors, janitors, and traders. The piece is considered the precursor to the larger Occupy movement.

Two other artists have braved the North Mississippi July heat, including sound artist Andrea Ray, whose 2013 project “Waiting” transformed the local gallery Yalo Studio — where all the Pinehurst residency shows are held — into a train station and suspended time to create a sense of longing through words, sounds, and objects and reintroduced the sounds of trains along Water Valley’s Main Street.

Last year, Susan Cianciolo, whose hand-sewn, customized clothing line RUN has ended up in the hands of collectors and is exhibited at PS 1 MOMA and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, created a sewing circle in Yalo Studio, where residents popped in and helped her create wall and floor tapestries and handmade flags for her show “The 8 Geometric Points of Together.”

“Each has been so unique, but the constant thread that runs through it is inviting artists to be inspired by the land and community,” Lapides says.

For Larson’s show “HOT BLIND EARTH,” he’s creating a terrarium in the gallery’s window using soil from each location he visited for his project, in addition to featuring five residents who regularly interact with the land.

A potter who uses his neighbor’s dirt as material and fires his kiln with wood from a local mill, a man who lives with a tree growing through his house, and an organic farmer who delivers farm-fresh produce she’s grown to locals are three who will be featured in the show, which also includes wet-plate collodion ambrotypes Larson shot with his large format camera.

“Everyone has been so warm and welcoming and open and honest. It’s so endearing. You get into a system in New York, looking at your feet and just moving from place to place. Here it’s built in that you expect it’s going to take time because you’re going to see people and sit and catch up over sweet tea,” Larson says. “I’m grateful I came into contact with people who are so open and honest.”

Throwell experienced a similar exchange.

“It’s one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done. I now feel closer to a group of people than I ever felt. [Some of the residents] and I still email all the time. How much better can you get than that?” Throwell says.

Cianciolo has gone into business with Yalo Studio owner Coulter Fussell and is opening YaloRun, a quilting supply store which will also host workshops taught by guest artists including Cianciolo, an instructor at Pratt Institute.

She also purchased a second home just up the road from the store.

“This experience was such a milestone for me. I realized the space alone was certainly as fulfilling for me, that I could come here to do my work and be inspired,” Cianciolo says.

“You could never do this in New York. There’s so much competition. There are no rules here in Mississippi, nobody saying an artist residency must look like this,” Lapides says.

“It’s such an amazing escape, I wanted to share it so others could see how awesome it is. You hear a lot of negative things about the South. It’s great when people can come down here, have a positive experience, and connect to the land and interesting people. That’s something I can offer.”