One of the most intriguing aspects of Lora Chilton’s historical novel 1666 may be the task of keeping the phonetically spelled names of people and places straight.
The story, based on a combination of what author Chilton refers to as “historical records and oral tradition,” is an inspired imagining of the struggle for survival of two members of the Indigenous Patawomeck (PaTow’O’Mek) tribe of Virginia (TseNaCoMoCo) following the attempted annihilation of the tribe by white colonial authorities in the year indicated by the novel’s title.
The primary characters, based on two women who may actually have existed, do indeed survive (though just barely), as, in the long run of history, has the tribe itself via surviving descendants, one of whom is Chilton herself. Her fellow Memphians may recall her as a prominent school board member and political activist (as Lora Jobe) of a few seasons back.
The aforementioned matter of phonetic spellings is really no obstacle to an immersion in the tale, functioning rather to ground one in a gripping sense of Being There in a present-tense reality. (And there are welcome recognitions, as when one of the story’s ultimate locations turns out to be a teeming place called MaNaHahTaAn (Manhattan).)
The main characters themselves have a variety of names. Ah’SaWei (Golden Fawn) is also Twenty-nine (her number as a freshly enslaved prisoner) and Rebecca (while serving in a Barnados household). And, similarly, NePaWeXo (Shining Moon) is Eighty-five and Leah.
To repeat, none of this gets in the way. For each of the characters, the identities are both discrete and overlapping. Each stands for a different phase of the characters’ destinies — Alternately horrific, heroic, and (relatively) mundane.
Those destinies occur within a meticulously outlined span of historical time in which the terrors and atrocities of the colonial era, described unblinkingly, are a basic part of the background and essentially define the course of events. But so, too, are the natural circumstances of life — love and sex prominently among them.
What did people of that milieu eat and how did they cultivate it? In what ways were their domestic tensions, coupling rituals, and emotional realities like or unlike our own? Chilton has researched it all and knows it in depth and can tell you.
And she does so with a dramatic, thriller-like sense of urgency that has us turning pages compulsively.
Some advance readers of the novel, whose blurbs are included with the text, focus on the story as “tragedy.” That’s a way of saying that terrible things happen and are accounted for graphically.
But what the story really is about is humanity’s unquenchable spirit and, as such, is the furthest thing imaginable from being a downer.
For years, decades even, Rachel Edelman avoided writing poems about Memphis, the place she was raised. “I wrote a lot of very detailed nature poetry and poetry that engaged with climate change, catastrophe,” she says, “and while I think that certainly prepared me craft-wise for writing these poems, I, for a long time, didn’t want to write about the South or Memphis or my upbringing.”
As Edelman shopped around her first collection of poems, there was not a mention of her hometown in those verses. Instead, she explored a re-envisioned Exodus and the Jewish diaspora, with poems like “Palinode after Pharaoh’s Decree,” “What I Know of God,” and “The Tether” about Miriam, Moses’ sister. She revised and revised, but something was missing: Memphis, her own diasporic relationship with the city, and her relationship with her own family.
She titled the series of poems that came to be “Dear Memphis,” and their addition to her pre-existing collection made it complete, made it something new, something that connected her ancestors’ past to her present. This new collection would be titled Dear Memphis as well and was released in January of this year.
This weekend, Edelman, who’s now based in Seattle as a teacher, will return to Memphis to discuss and sign Dear Memphis at Novel (Friday, April 12, 6 p.m.) and Temple Israel at Crosstown (Saturday, April 13, 6:30 p.m.). In anticipation of her homecoming, the Flyer asked Edelman some questions about Dear Memphis and her poetry. See her answers below.
Memphis Flyer: You said that you avoided writing about Memphis previously. Why is that?
Rachel Edelman: In writing — at least in formal writing education settings — I was always taught to avoid sentimentality. And not to write — literally — not to write poems about your grandma. And [the writings in Dear Memphis] are poems very deeply engaged with that generation, with my grandparents’ generation, and the way that I have become a culture-bearer of theirs, and so I avoided it because I was told academically that it wasn’t high-class, quite honestly.
But then, in reading much more widely, there’s this poet — Aracelis Girmay — and reading her, “The Black Maria,” it showed me a way of incorporating archival research history, alongside personal story really, and it really moved me. It was both incredibly cerebral and incredibly embodied. And reading a work like that showed me you don’t have to choose. … And then speaking to other poets, who were writing gorgeous work that didn’t fear sentimentality, that didn’t fear emotion, I kind of opened up to writing these more personal poems. And while I don’t think that we necessarily need to lay all of our trauma on the page, I think it’s okay to welcome the more fallible and the more sticky moments as they come. … I think that there’s a lot of strength in veering into emotionally fraught territory.
What was the initial spark for your “Dear Memphis” poems?
I wrote those after doing the Tin House Summer Workshop, which was virtual in the summer of 2020. … [We were given a prompt to] write to somebody you’ve never met. You could write to someone who passed, you could write to a place or an idea, and I started writing “Dear Memphis” poems. And then I wrote them for a few months and they felt really intimate to me in a way that was important for the rest of the book. And they are probably the poems in the book that are revised least; they’re closest to their first draft.
Have you been back to Memphis since the collection has been released?
I haven’t. My family doesn’t live there anymore. My parents moved away in 2015, and grandma died in 2012. So the last time I was in Memphis was in 2017 for a residency at Crosstown.
But I am excited. And I also feel the distance that I’ve had from Memphis really acutely. Like, this is a book titled Dear Memphis, and for it to address Memphis, it requires a separation.
Does coming back to Memphis and living in Seattle feel like a diasporic experience on its own?
It does feel diasporic. [Memphis] feels like a diasporic home. My family lived in Memphis for five generations. I don’t know where else in the world my family has lived for that long because we are a diasporic people. And I firmly believe that Jews are a diasporic people, that we thrive in diaspora. And so, I don’t believe in a Jewish homeland, and I think it’s exciting to have many stops along our way along my lineage.
I think that these poems all engage with a vision of commitment to diaspora, … so that is really a thread that lines up for all of these poems. I also think that it’s an ethos that requires risk. It requires rejection of Zionism. And it requires a willingness to make overtures and alliances that may not work out, or that may require a lot of trust-building. So I think all of these poems are like gesturing at the complexities of that work.
Sara Koffi began her novel in the summer of 2020. It wasn’t a pandemic project, born out of boredom, but rather seeded from the racial reckoning that stemmed from the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
“It was a concern about if these people and their families will actually achieve justice. A stress that these cases weren’t going to have a resolution that matched the justice needed,” she says. “And I kind of took the seed of that paranoia and put it toward the book essentially — that was like the seed of the beginning of While We Were Burning.”
The novel, Koffi says, is “first and foremost fun — fun is not the right word — but it is a fun, fast-paced, twisty read. And then secondly it’s exploring important themes.”
For her debut novel, Koffi puts two women’s stories into counterpoint: Elizabeth, a woman on a downward spiral as she questions the mysterious circumstances surrounding her friend’s death, and Briana, who is hired as Elizabeth’s personal assistant to help her pick up the pieces.
But Briana has questions of her own. The Memphis police have killed her son, and now she’s on the search for who called the cops on her child on that fateful day that took him away.
Together the women rush towards finding their answers as their relationship blurs the line between employer and friend, predator and prey.
“The thriller genre is very good about exploring justice outside of the usual justice system,” Koffi says. “So I thought for a story like this, it’d be fitting.”
The story begins in Elizabeth’s first-person perspective, which switches with Briana’s third-person narrative throughout the novel. “I often joke that Elizabeth thinks she’s the main character. She’s like, ‘This is my story.’ And then Briana, who arguably is actually the main character, does not center herself the same way.”
Even so, the prologue depicts Elizabeth lamenting her crumbling marriage. “She doesn’t know what book she’s in,” Koffi says. “She cannot conceive of Briana entering into her life. You know, this woman’s very concerned, kind of a borderline obsessed with her husband, like a domestic thriller trope. And then you keep reading. You’re like, ‘Oh, I think that’s a different book. That’s not what’s actually going to happen.’
“That was the first thing I wrote,” Koffi adds of the prologue, “and it has not changed from editing, drafting, to now. That has remained the same, untouched. … Once I got a good grasp of [Elizabeth], it’s like the story started to unfold.”
And, always, Koffi knew, this story was going to unfold in Memphis, the city where she grew up. “I also know about the city’s history, its involvement in the NAACP and Civil Rights Movement as well. And I thought it was interesting because the city also has a history of seeking justice on its own, so that was an interesting parallel to what’s happening in the story.
“For me personally,” Koffi says, “to have a book set in Memphis be the first book I put out, it feels like a major responsibility. But it’s a good one because I’m gonna have a lot of readers who have not been to the city and this book is gonna be their gateway to what the city is like without actually having visited there. I’m hoping — outside of the thriller background — that I capture the city. This is a good city. [Elizabeth and Briana are] having some drama, but the city itself is fine.”
But Koffi doesn’t just want to promote Memphis. She wants to create “a thoughtful moment for the reader as well. For me, I want that moment to kind of be a reflection on, like, are there are other things that I’m doing without thinking about it? That might be affecting other people? Do I have my own blinders on when it comes to certain things in my life, and may that be affecting other things?”
Once again, the Memphis Flyer has taken to the streets (read: email) to ask Memphis’ booksellers what on Earth we should be reading this month. And, thank goodness, they’ve answered with recommendations that’ll fit on anyone’s bookshelf. Check them out below.
Black Roses: Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Women, Harold Green III Black Roses is a beautiful collection of odes crafted by poet Harold Green III and pays tribute to all Black women by focusing on visionaries and leaders who are making history right now, including Ava DuVernay, Janelle Monae, Kamala Harris, Misty Copeland, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Robin Roberts, Roxane Gay, Simone Biles, and many others. The collection features full-color illustrations by Melissa Koby. We recommend this book because it’s a powerful expression of love for women during Women’s History Month! — Jeremee DeMoir, owner at DeMoir Books & Things
Dance of Thieves, Mary E. Pearson Dance of Thieves is a fantasy duology with a strong female main character. The book contains enemies to lovers, forced proximity, found family, and multiple plot twists. It is masterfully written as the reader is entirely captured by the plot and never bored with what is happening. Although it is set in a fictional world, it is an easily followed story and the characters are realistic. This duology is similar to Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, and I would definitely recommend it to any fantasy readers. — Maya Zelinski, bookseller and co-founder/co-leader of the Teen Writing Group at Novel
James, Percival Everett I only discovered Percival Everett last year and I’m now trying to catch up and read everything. He’s one of our finest and most versatile writers, and this new one is one of his best. Witty, wise, joyful, painful, important, and highly readable. I predict this will finally win him the Pulitzer. — Corey Mesler, owner at Burke’s Book Store
The Other Valley, Scott Alexander Howard The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard came out in February to glowing reviews, but hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention at the store if you ask me! Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro is an obvious and faithful comp, but while I have started NLMG more times than I can count and could never finish, I fell for this one immediately. It’s speculative fiction, sort of literary sci-fi, set in a world made up of a series of valleys — the same place, with the same people, duplicated over and over 20 years ahead of or behind the next, depending on whether you’re going west or east. Does this sound convoluted? I hear it, too. But trust me when I say it does not require any kind of mental mastery of its bent laws of physics to enjoy. The writing is so good I found myself rereading some sentences three or four times, just to soak them in. It’s a quiet, atmospheric novel full of big ideas that manages to double as a page-turner. Basically, my favorite kind of book. — Kat Leache, Social Media & Promotions at Novel
Thicker Than Water: A Memoir, Kerry Washington Award-winning actor, director, producer, and activist Kerry Washington shares the journey of her life so far in this bravely intimate story of discovering her truth. We selected this as it comes from the woman who changed television. Best known for portraying Olivia Pope on the ABC hit Scandal, when it premiered, a Black woman hadn’t had the lead role in a network drama for nearly 40 years. Kerry Washington changed the game and Scandal decimated the idea that a Black female lead would alienate audiences, proving, instead, that it would energize them. Why not celebrate such a powerful figure and share this powerful book during Women’s History Month? — Jeremee DeMoir, owner at DeMoir Books & Things
All books mentioned can be purchased at the respective bookstore locations. Support indie and support local. For upcoming book events, including book clubs and author signings, visit the Flyer’s event calendar.
I don’t know about you, but my TBR (“to be read,” for those not keeping up with the lingo) list keeps on growing and growing and growing, and yet I’m out here acting like I just don’t know what to read. Because I don’t. There are just too many choices. So, like any good journalist, I took advantage of my power, wielded my press badge (which doesn’t exist), and went to the source (Memphis’ booksellers) to ask the age-old question, “What should I read?”, and have someone else make the choice for me. It’s important work, I know. And I don’t do it just for me. I do it for the people. For you.
Jasmine Settles, owner of Cafe Noir, whose brick and mortar is slated to open at the end of this month, has two suggestions for me — I mean, us — The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham and Tenderheadedby Olatunde Osinaike. Of Tenderheaded, she says, “That was actually selected as a winner of the [2022] National Poetry Series. The book focuses on masculinity, Black male identity. And I love how the work is so gentle, but it has also kind of like a music rhythm to it. Just like how his work kind of expands with language and he will take a word and kind of build around it. And he is a coder, like a computer coder. I truly, really admire his work and his style.”
“I think The Mayor of Maxwell Street is a really good one as well,” Settles says. “[The author] is from Memphis. I think her work is brilliant.” Within The Mayor of Maxwell Street, the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America,” Nelly Sawyer, finds herself the premier debutante of Black society after the sudden death of her only brother, and immediately, she is whisked off to a number of social engagements as part of her coming-out, much to her chagrin. She has her secrets, though — for the past year, she’s written as an undercover investigative journalist, reporting “the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim Crow.” Nelly’s latest assignment: to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate, the so-called Mayor of Maxwell Street. Soon, she enlists the help of the mysterious low-level speakeasy manager, Jay Shorey.
Settles isn’t the only one recommending Cunningham’s debut novel; so is Jeremee DeMoir of DeMoir Books & Things. For younger readers, though, he recommends Jason Reynolds’ Stuntboy (Children’s) and Keith F. Miller Jr.’s Pritty (YA). And for a more classic read, DeMoir has been reading Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
“He’s just a classic author, with a really amazing touch,” the online bookstore owner says. “He breathes fresh life into a romantic mystery. Giovanni’s Room is a classic queer novel that follows two characters in Paris as they’re going through discovering their identity within the queer community in Paris in the 1950s. So it’s a book definitely ahead of its time, but super refreshing and super current despite being written in the 20th century.”
Lastly, Corey Mesler of Burke’s Book Store gives his two cents on what’s in this month: “Claire Keegan’s outsize bandwagon is worth jumping on. I don’t mind being the hundred-thousandth reader to marvel at her spare, shimmering prose, and recommend her to all and sundry. Her latest, So Late in the Day, a collection of three short stories (two appeared in previous books) is more evidence that she is one of our best writers, despite her limited output. Quality over quantity. My favorite is her novel, Small Things Like These (the title might be a statement of purpose). You can read it in one sitting but you will savor its reverberations long after setting it down.”
All books mentioned can be purchased at the respective bookstore locations. Support indie and support local. For upcoming book events, including book clubs and author signings, visit the Flyer’s event calendar.
I worked with Vince Vawter at the old Memphis Press-Scimitar when it was in the now-demolished Memphis Publishing Co. building (what we veterans still call “the old building”) at 495 Union Avenue.
It looked like those old newsrooms in the movies of the 1930s and ’40s. And it was full of characters that rivaled any character actors in those old newspaper movies.
Vawter brings that old newsroom — and the Memphis of another era — to life as part of the background of his latest book, Manboy, which is part three of his Paperboy Trilogy.
Vawter’s 40-year career in newspapers includes publisher and president of the Evansville Courier & Press, managing editor of The Knoxville News Sentinel, and news editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar.
Vawter, who lives in Louisville, Tennessee, will be at a book signing at 2 p.m. on February 10th at Novel.
I recently asked Vawter some questions about the book.
Vince Vawter at the Blount County Public Library (Photo: Betty Vawter)
Memphis Flyer: Were you ever a copy boy? I seem to remember you telling me you weren’t.
Vince Vawter: I was never a copy clerk. I started my newspaper career as a sportswriter at the Pine Bluff Commercial in Arkansas. My first job at The Press-Scimitar was on the copy desk. I thought that placing the protagonist, Victor Vollmer, as a copy clerk was a good way for him to enter the newspaper business, just like somebody else I know.
What was it about the old Memphis Publishing building that made it so special?
The Memphis Publishing Company building was once owned by the Ford Motor Company and was re-adapted for newspaper publishing. It had the openness and feel of a newsroom with its 20-foot ceilings and desks jammed together with pneumatic tubes running hither and yon. I liked to feel the concrete floors rumble when the giant presses would crank up to full speed. I wanted readers to experience the feel of a genuine newsroom in the heyday of newspapers and explain how a newspaper was actually produced on deadline. All the newspaper headlines in Manboy are verbatim from The Press-Scimitar and The Commercial Appeal.
How much of your lead character is like you?
Victor Vollmer is certainly based on my early life in all three books of the trilogy, especially the portions dealing with my stutter. … Some readers question the naivete of the protagonist, but you have to remember this was the ’60s and another world from what we have now.
I love all the history of Memphis that I can relate to because I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s.
Of the three books in the trilogy, this is the one that treats the city of Memphis as almost a character in itself. When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I rushed back to Memphis from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I spent that weekend in April 1968 just watching the city and listening. I remember those four days like it was yesterday. My most vivid memory is watching the Downtown march on that Monday after the assassination and then being swept up in it. I can still hear one of the parade marshals telling everyone “not to chew gum” while they were marching. The march was orderly and personally inspiring.
Will there be another one of these? Maybe the lead character becomes a newspaper reporter or an editor.
Paperboy introduces Vic when he is 11. In Copyboy, Vic is 17. He is 21 in Manboy. I envisioned the trilogy after the publication of Paperboy when literally hundreds of readers emailed me questions wanting to know what happened to the characters in the book. I decided to bring readers along on the complete journey. I doubt there will be another Paperboy book because a four-book set is known as a “tetralogy,” which seems a little off-putting and Jurassic.
What kind of feedback do you get from readers of these three books?
Readers say they appreciate that I shared the entire journey from adolescence to adulthood with them. This is rarely done in literature these days. Although most of my readers seem to be older than the “young adult” label, I did want the narrative to grow along with my readers.
The books were published over a 10-year period, just as the narrative encompasses 10 years of Vic’s life. Close readers, especially speech-language pathologists, say they admire how Vic’s attitudes about his stutter change over the 10-year period. After the success of Paperboy [Newbery Honor, quarter-million in sales, translated into 18 languages], I was a little taken aback that Penguin Random House chose not to continue with the story. The reason given was that the publisher did not like popular protagonists to grow older. That’s not life, I said, and my books are my life. My publisher said that it may not be life, but it’s publishing.
Any news on the musical made from Paperboy? Anything else happening? A movie maybe?
The musical’s creative team entered Paperboy and its 22 original songs in two musical theater competitions this spring in New York City. We hope that this will result in another production besides the one we had at the Manhattan School of Music last year. We continue to hear rumblings from movie types, but nothing to report so far. I think the trilogy itself and the boy’s 10-year journey would make a more complete movie narrative and satisfy more viewers, but we’ll just bide our time.
Over the past 30 years, Memphis comic book artist, sculptor, and filmmaker John Michael McCarthy, aka Mike McCarthy, has taken self-mythologizing to a level few others have matched, often weaving elements of his compelling personal history into fantastic scenarios drawn from the B movies, comics, and pop icons of his youth. That’s especially true of what’s arguably McCarthy’s greatest work, the film Teenage Tupelo, released in 1995 by Something Weird Video.
Ostensibly telling the tale of a young, buxom single mother’s odyssey through Tupelo’s underground, circa 1962, as she comes to terms with an unwanted pregnancy, it’s chiefly an homage to the low-budget flicks (think Roger Corman or Russ Meyer) that captivated young McCarthy as he grew up in Elvis Presley’s hometown, echoing those films’ visceral impact via Darin Ipema’s pitch-perfect, mostly black-and-white cinematography and a sizzling soundtrack by surf rock-crime jazz kings Impala.
The film became a cult favorite in the ’90s, championing the burgeoning garage aesthetic of that era. No prior knowledge of McCarthy’s personal history was needed to savor the raw shock of the film’s visuals and sounds. Its staying power was confirmed in 2020 when Portugal’s Chaputa Records revived Impala’s soundtrack on vinyl, then again last May when the film was remastered and released on Blu-ray. But if the latter’s bonus director’s commentary hinted at the many layers of influences behind the film, that was nothing compared to what came next: a coffee table tome which publisher Fantagraphics Books describes as “a mammoth volume dedicated to one of the last underground sexploitation films of the 20th Century.”
With more than 300 generously illustrated pages, this would be a monumental tribute to any film, yet in this case, beyond honoring McCarthy’s vision, it’s a tribute to the entire Memphis scene of the ’90s. The fact that it’s a compendium of “essays, reviews, articles, and interviews” rather than a single narrative is actually a strength, as the book offers many voices, some from the era, some looking back in hindsight. Impala’s Scott Bomar, for instance, writes movingly of recording with the legendary Roland Janes. There are also reminiscences by the star of the film, D’Lana Tunnell of Texas, and the three supporting actors from Memphis, Kristen Hobbs, Sophie Couch (Christine Gladney), and Dawn Ashcraft (who most Memphians know as McCarthy’s wife at the time, Kimberly Ashcraft). These essays — and accompanying photos — are especially “revealing” as the four women describe McCarthy cajoling them into performing topless, and the spirit of gonzo transgression in which they did so. One might thus consider both the film and this book as bold shots across the bow in the “free the nipple” movement.
The introduction by the Commercial Appeal’s John Beifuss sets the context perfectly, and the Memphis Flyer is well-represented with writings by Greg Akers, Chris Davis, Susan Ellis, John Floyd, Andria Lisle, and yours truly. Also on display is a letter by McCarthy’s biological father, Terry Blair Carr, published by the Flyer in 2008, though no one knew of that connection at the time.
And that is where the personal, emotional heart of the book resides. Most of the essays are by McCarthy himself, and while many of them, bursting with wordplay, concern the process of indie filmmaking, the director, an adopted child, also delves deeply into the private family history that obliquely inspired the film. As he ruminates on the parents who raised him as well as his search for his biological parents, the book becomes a profoundly moving detective story. A further essay by Tunnell, in which she reveals that she too was adopted, resonates with this, marking both the book and the film as expressions of very heartfelt histories.
Part of the mystery and allure of these histories is where they overlapped with the mythic realm of Elvis Presley, and his presence throughout the book lends the proceedings an epic glow. The result is a rich tapestry woven from the families, friendships, fetishes, and fandom of the last century in the land that McCarthy calls “Mythissippi,” but also in Memphis itself. And, as a celebration of the latter, the milieu in which McCarthy’s vision took root, this volume is unparalleled. Far from being mere vanity projects, the film and the book are emblematic of an evolving community. As Bomar writes, “if I were to stumble upon a time machine, I would dial in Mike McCarthy’s Memphis, TN, in the ’90s.”
Memphian Avery Cunningham debuts her novel at the end of January. (Photo: Andrea Fenise)
Avery Cunningham was destined to be a storyteller. Even at a young age, she would stand on a stepping stool in her childhood kitchen in Jackson, Tennessee, and just orate what she now calls “stream of consciousness tales.” People would filter in and out, and Cunningham would keep telling her stories. “I would do this for hours,” she says. “And I guess that’s the clearest representation of the type of person I am and how I’ve always been this person who wanted to tell stories even if no one was listening.”
Except people are ready to listen to Cunningham’s stories. At the beginning of 2022, she sold her debut novel to Hyperion Avenue on proposal, a rare feat for a debut author but, as Cunningham assures, more common than one might think. “I honestly wish that more people talked openly about it, so writers don’t feel this incredible pressure to have written the perfect book right out of the gate,” she says.
She didn’t have years to sit and ponder. She had a deadline, and a full-time job at Southern College of Optometry’s student services. There were late nights with “big dead eyes” stretched open to the glare of the computer screen. There were two-hour-long walks with her Bernese mountain dog, Grizzly, while she devised her story’s structure. And there were visits to Memphis coffee shops and hotel lobbies where she wrote and wrote and wrote, and occasionally looked up to watch those around her, the way they moved, the sound of their voice, could they fit a character’s description?
“They don’t tell you when you’re in a writing program where you have all of this time built in to discover your craft that the challenge is working on this incredible craft and art — these really soul- and time-eating pursuits — while also trying to be a constructive member of society,” Cunningham says. “And that’s a challenge but also that’s part of what it means to be a working novelist right now. … I love that part. I didn’t love it at the time when I was up at one o’clock in the morning, but I love that part of the writing experience and it helps it feel a bit more real.”
This was, after all, what Cunningham had been working towards, what she’d gone to undergraduate and graduate school for at DePaul University in Chicago, and on January 30th, she will celebrate the launch of her novel The Mayor of Maxwell Street, a historical drama about the Black elite in 1920s Chicago.
Cunningham frequented coffee shops and hotel lobbies to write and observe passersby in the making of her novel. (Photo: Andrea Fenise)
ON MAXWELL STREET
Avery Cunningham’s book doesn’t open with the glitz and glamor you’d expect from a 1920s drama — that comes later. Instead, a prologue settles the reader in a dilapidated plantation in Alabama, a sign of the Old South, where a white woman falsely and maliciously accuses a Black man of rape, a tragedy that history is all too familiar with. Yet, this is not the story at the center of Cunningham’s novel, though it’ll reveal its relevance as the plot unravels. The prologue, ultimately, serves as context, a contrast for the unfamiliar yet vibrant aspect of American history that has seldom been honored or explored in media.
Within The Mayor of Maxwell Street, the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America,” Nelly Sawyer, finds herself the premier debutante of Black society after the sudden death of her only brother, and immediately, she is whisked off to a number of social engagements as part of her coming-out, much to her chagrin. She has her secrets, though — for the past year, she’s written as an undercover investigative journalist, reporting “the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim Crow.” Nelly’s latest assignment: to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate, the so-called Mayor of Maxwell Street. Soon, she enlists the help of the mysterious low-level speakeasy manager, Jay Shorey.
So, yes, there’s glitz and glamor, guns and gangsters, speakeasies and soirees in this novel that seeks out life’s contradictions and doesn’t shy away from its harsh realities. At once Cunningham’s Chicago is alluring, dazzling even, yet its underbelly is foreboding, her characters under the pressure of “the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the Black upper class, and the violence of Prohibition-era Chicago.”
“I wanted to honor that era,” Cunningham says. “And I tried to be as historically accurate or representative of the place and the time and the people as I could. But of course, I also didn’t want to attempt to match Fitzgerald’s style or [Nella] Larsen’s style or any writers that were really prevalent during the ’20s. Because it was a different time, a different place, and different readers. So I just hope that my own voice kind of came through but also still managed to honor as much of the historical accuracy as possible.”
THE MAKING OF THE BOOK
“I’ve called myself a writer for pretty much as long as I’ve been aware of written language,” Cunningham says. “And historical fiction has always been what I’ve enjoyed. … One of my first novels ever, or technically a novel — it’s buried somewhere in a box from when I was 13 years old — but even that first experience of novel writing was set in medieval France. And so I love the research aspect of historical fiction. I love how history is so often stranger than fiction or stranger than what we think reality might be. And there are already so many amazing stories nestled in the past. And through historical fiction writers can really bring all of that to light and expose new readers and new people to the stories and kind of really honor the lives of the past.”
In 2020 and 2021, mainstream media began to incorporate people of color in historical settings that traditionally excluded them, Cunningham says. The Netflix series Bridgerton, for instance, cast Black men and women in roles of British aristocracy during a period when slavery was central to Britain’s economy. “I think that there was a hunger with stories like Bridgerton — that yes, thank you for the representation, but also let’s not pretend that this didn’t already exist in its own community,” Cunningham says. “Instead of trying to rewrite a history that never tried to include us in the first place, maybe acknowledge the history that really did exist at the time and all of its seriousness and all of its wealth and joy and happiness. … I was really hungry for a story that made Black Americans the primary narrative.”
Through books like The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham, Cunningham says she was awakened to the truth of Black wealth and all the facets of Black history in this country. Some of the historical figures she read about during her research even make appearances in her novel. “I wanted to make sure that people could read this book and know that these people could exist,” Cunningham says. “This is not is not a fantasy. This is not someone trying to create some kind of alternate history. These individuals, even though they may have not gone through the specific trials or the experiences, existed in this world. And my hope is that people might [look up] Robert Pelham [a journalist] or The Chicago Defender [the African-American paper Nelly writes for] … and learn about this whole different side of life they may not have realized existed in the first place.”
At the time of her research, Cunningham also happened to be reading The Great Gatsby. “It really is such a fascinating tale of wealth and intrigue and kind of the corruption and the artifice of the American dream. And I thought that was a narrative that was really prime to the Black experience, one never really seen through any kind of diverse perspective.”
Cunningham’s novel was almost a Gatsby retelling, she admits, but as her story took shape, it became less and less like it. “Over the course of the writing process, it became … [about], more than anything, the kind of the sacrifices that people were forced to make when challenging the status quo in this country, especially during times when that status quo is changing,” she says. “And we’re living in a very similar time where the status quo not only in this country but truly across the world is shifting dramatically, and still to this day people who seek to challenge that status quo … are facing terrible backlash. So I felt like it was truly reflective of the times that we’re living in now and that we might be living in future years.”
“Everything informs everything else,” Cunningham adds. “That’s one of the fascinating things about historical fiction, that you may be researching a certain time or certain place, but everything that you’ve learned or absorbed from every time period or past experience is informing that time or that place because people change, people move around, people who represent different communities relocate and change that community.”
In fact, prior to working on The Mayor of Maxwell Street, Cunningham had been working on a novel centered around Memphis hoodoo. “So this city was very much still in the back of my mind because of all that research and work I’ve done on Memphis during the 1920s,” she says. “And it did feel like, as I did more research, there were so many similarities between the two cities and the experiences of the two cities that just rounded it out in a way that I really hadn’t anticipated. … So, I think living here and writing this story really informed the entire process and gave the entire soul of the book something more rich and meaningful.”
Cunningham called Grizzly a “great writing partner.” (Photo: Avery Cunningham via Instagram)
TO DEBUT
Today, Cunningham revels in “all of the emotions, every emotion that one could ever possibly feel” as the launch of her debut approaches. “It’s strange,” she says. “And I talked to a lot of writers who go through a similar feeling that even though you’ve put so much work and time into a story or a book — it’s something that you really love and believe in and are passionate about — there’s still this sense of almost like an impostor syndrome. Like, how am I worthy of being the one to tell this story? Am I the appropriate person to tell this? Should someone else who’s more educated, who’s more experienced, who has more talent — should they be the ones to honor these characters?
“It is super exciting, and I’m so honored that this story gets to be kind of my start in this career professionally. And I think it was a professor of mine who I was talking to and they said that every person’s individual experience is important and that every story that is told is important. Even if someone else tells a similar story to The Mayor of Maxwell Street, it’s still incredibly valid because it would be derived from their experience. So it does kind of uplift you to think that because of who I am, who my parents are, who my family is going back 300 years, that makes this book particular and specific and unique. So it’s not a question of am I worthy to tell this story? It’s bigger than just me.”
Cunningham continues, “The wonderful thing also about art is that you will find your audience that really sees themselves in your stories and you eventually learn and accept and really revel in the fact that you’re writing for them. You’re not writing for the world. You’re writing for the people who maybe need this more than even you do.”
But two readers’ opinions have mattered more than others’: those of her parents. “They both were very supportive and they said they really liked it. That’s it. As long as they think it’s good, then it doesn’t matter.”
The Mayor of Maxwell Street is available in hardcover and paperback for preorder wherever you buy your books. Avery Cunningham will celebrate the launch of her novel with a “Meet the Author” event at Novel in conversation with Tara Stringfellow, author of Memphis, on Tuesday, January 30th, 6 p.m.
Earlier this month, Michael Kiggins released his debut novel, And the Train Kept Moving (Running Wild Press). Set in Memphis, the book uncovers the story of Bryan Meigs, described as “a gay alcoholic with OCD who struggles with the aftermath of getting date-raped and potentially infected with HIV.” It’s a story about mental illness, addiction, and compulsion, and it’s a story about a doomed quest for revenge.
A former student of the University of Memphis, Kiggins now lives in Nashville but will return to Memphis for a reading and book signing at Burke’s Book Store this Friday at 5:30 p.m. In anticipation of the event, we spoke with the author about his debut novel and his writing journey. Here’s what he had to say. — Abigail Morici
Memphis Flyer: What drove you to write this book?
Michael Kiggins: It started off almost 20 years ago as part of my MFA thesis, but it was a completely different book. It’s gone through several drafts. The narrator and protagonist of the final published draft was originally a secondary character. Just full disclosure, I have OCD, kind of bad, and I just sort of locked into Bryan as the narrator and his mental illness and how that shapes the way that he looks at the world and reacts to the things that happened to him and the things that he does became the spine of the novel. I kind of wanted to explore [OCD] — sort of like, what if a person dealt with what I have sort of have dealt with and mostly gotten over, but that person didn’t [get over it] and what if they went into a really dark place because of it? And I wanted to study that in a time that advances in HIV treatment were there, had been there for about seven years, but it was nine years before the FDA would approve PrEP and 12 years before marriage equality. So much better times than the early ’80s and early ’90s, But his mental illness and just fixations and obsessions can’t really let him see past his own fears of infection. …
There have been times in previous versions where [the novel] was third person and I just felt like it wasn’t clicking, that it was too removed. And I think one of the strengths of the narration in this final version is that you are so locked into Bryan’s sort of headspace, and — I don’t know if I succeeded at this — but I wanted readers to sort of feel trapped as he is in his own thoughts.
Why was it important for your character to have OCD?
OCD in popular culture and then media often gets reduced to very simplistic things often about tidiness and anal retentiveness, and I really would like for people to inhabit a character who is constantly on guard, trying to protect himself, not really fully understanding exactly how that is ruining his life. I wanted [readers] to feel the obsessive nature that often just gets reduced to a punchline. Also, by using the first person narrator, I wanted them to sort of sympathize with Bryan, but at the same time, by the end of the novel and over the course of the novel, to really begin questioning their allegiances, and why maybe they originally identified with him. I mean, he does some horrible stuff. The novel opens and we know he’s murdered somebody. To me the novel is a tragedy, but the narrator of this novel believes this is sort of a comedy in the classic sense. He is deluding himself. He thinks he’s claimed a victory, but we can hopefully recognize just the pure tragedy of it.
Why did you choose to set your novel in Memphis over any other place?
I have been in Nashville since 2002, but I was in Memphis from the fall of 1993 until May 2002. I went to undergrad when it was still Memphis State University at the time. And I worked in the mental health field for a few years.Then I realized I didn’t want to do that with my life. So I Hail-Mary-ed an application for [University of Memphis’] MFA program and got in. I started writing [the story] in Memphis like little scraps of scenes here and there, and I didn’t change it because, I don’t know, I love Memphis to death. To me, Memphis was just such a character in the novel itself. And there’s just something about the city that when I lived there, I knew so many people that had been there forever and would rag on the city but they’d never moved. In certain ways, I wanted Bryan to be sort of emblematic of the kind of person who has stayed in Memphis maybe too long, but doesn’t really know how to move on with his life.
What made you shift from working in the mental health field to pursuing creative writing?
I wasn’t an English major in undergrad. And in fact, I didn’t have enough English credits from undergrad when I got into the MFA program so I had to take some extra classes, but I wrote my first novel in high school. But when I graduated with my B.S. in psych, I worked in the mental health field, and by the end of that, I was so stressed that I had worn deep gouges into my steering wheel, just from the stress. Eventually, I went to work for Friends for Life, and it was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling jobs in my life. But I lost many clients to HIV. I had recently lost one of my favorite clients, and my partner was like, ‘Michael, do you want to do social work for the rest of your professional career?’ And it was such an obvious question, but I hadn’t really ever considered it. At that point, I had been writing a lot, but before the MFA program, I’d never been in a writing workshop. So that sort of opened my eyes to how much I needed to learn. But the program probably saved my life. If I had stayed in the mental health field without any sort of options, I don’t know who I would be today.
Do you feel that you were able to benefit by having another career before pursuing writing professionally and by working on this book for almost two decades?
I’m so grateful for the time I had to really just put this aside to grow as a person, to reconsider what I was attempting to do, and to maybe shed some of my youthful or late 20s, early 30 pretensions. I’m dealing with a lot of heavy topics, and with the very different book that it was way back then [when I first started], I don’t think I had enough insights to accomplish what I was trying to even then. So, yeah, the many extra years really let me sort of interrogate things on a deeper level and just simply refine my writing at the sentence level. But I’m also very grateful and glad that I’m being published before I’m 50.
And the Train Kept Moving is available for purchase on Amazon and Burke’s Book Store. An audiobook is in production.
On her TikTok account, Chloe Sexton, owner of BluffCakes, revealed that she’s in a bit of a dilemma. Google her name, and you get her TikTok, her cookies, clips of her on The Kelly Clarkson Show, a host of articles, from Today.com to yours truly, the Memphis Flyer. But Google “Chloe Sexton book,” and you end up with some results leading to an array of adult novels by another “Chloe Sexton.” “Turns out I’m not the only Chloe Sexton on the planet. Go figure,” she says in her video. “Only 7 billion people on the planet, but all the 7 billion people whittled down to make this happen to me.”
Fortunately, we’re not here to talk about that Chloe Sexton’s literary achievement. Rather, we’re here to talk about Memphis’ own Chloe Sexton’s new cookbook, Big Yum: Supersized Cookies for Over-the-Top Cravings, released yesterday by Page Street Publishing, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers. The cookbook, Sexton says, might just be the biggest book deal to come out of Memphis.
Sexton first caught the attention of Page Street two years ago through her TikTok account (@chloebluffcakes), where she shares her personal life and her love of baking — specifically baking large cookies for her online business. Since then, the account has grown to 2.1 million followers and 75.5 million likes, and Sexton has even opened her brick-and-mortar storefront in Germantown. Through it all, over those two years, Sexton had also been developing Big Yum.
The cookbook has 52 giant cookie recipes, most of which were created just for this cookbook. “We’ve got at least two or three recipes in this book that we not only ship internationally, but yes, we offer at our storefront here in Germantown,” she says. “But the rest of them — other than those like two or three — are completely new. We’ve never shipped them. We’ve never sold them in a store. They are completely organic to the book, so you’re gonna make them yourself and be surprised.”
Though the baker admits she hasn’t “done a ton of teaching people,” her start as a home-baker has served as an advantage while creating the cookbook. “I did not at all come from a background of a pastry degree or go to the Culinary Institute of America,” says Sexton, who worked as a news producer before turning to baking full time. “I had to start from my own kitchen, and have been baking from 14 years old on. So I really know what does and doesn’t work in a home kitchen.”
But the cookbook isn’t just recipes, she says. “I’m sharing my life in the book. The people who are going to buy this book — they know me. They followed me for a long time. A lot of my content has been about the business and it’s been about the cookies and promoting this thing that I’ve built, but more than that, there is an audience that’s gonna buy this cookbook because they watched me lose my mom and watch me actively take on a role at becoming my sister’s sole guardian, and I had an opportunity to really dive deeper into more things maybe they don’t know about me.
“I want them to see that it matters to me that I’m having a conversation with the reader,” Sexton continues. “I’m not gonna put out a cookbook and pretend like, oh, none of that really, really difficult stuff ever happened. No, it’s present. We are gonna talk about it. And I want them to know that there’s not going to be a chapter where I just stop talking about what made me me, what put me on the map on social media.”
In fact, when conceiving these recipes, Sexton looked for inspiration in what brought up her best and favorite memories. One cookie is named after her late mom Jenny Wren; another, the Dreamsicle cookie, takes her back to her childhood in Florida, chasing after the ice cream truck in hopes she could score one of those orange frozen treats. “When I normally bake for shipping or for our bakery, it’s all about what the consumer wants,” she says. “Whereas the book is more about what I want to share.”
Among the things she wants to share is her pride for the place she calls home: Memphis. “[The book deal] is definitely something that makes me really conscious about representing the city that I’m proud of,” she says.
In honor of the book’s release, Novel is hosting a launch party Friday, September 22nd, at Restaurant Iris. The chefs at Iris will offer an intimate two-course dinner, and Sexton will do a live cooking demonstration, preparing a vanilla cheesecake with a berry compote. Tickets ($75) are required for this event and include a copy of Big Yum and the opportunity to meet the author and have your book signed. A virtual option is available for $23.99 and includes a signed copy of Big Yum and a link to watch the live cooking demonstration. Find more information about the event and purchase tickets here.
Big Yum: Supersized Cookies for Over-the-Top Cravings is available at all major bookstores and at Novel.
BluffCakes is at 7850 Poplar Ave., Ste. 24, Germantown; bluffcakes.com.
