Category: Book Features

Categories
Book Features Books

Jamie Harmon’s “Memphis Quarantine”

Grayson Oberg (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

“The Memphis Quarantine Project started on March 13, 2020,” writes photographer Jamie Harmon in the opening lines of his new book, Memphis Quarantine (Amurica), and noting the date only heightens the new volume’s sense of time travel. By that Friday the 13th, the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a pandemic and area schools were transitioning to remote learning or extra time off. With the city’s official lockdown more than a week away, most of us were already radically rethinking our routines — and at that point, many feared contagion from just touching groceries. There was but one suggestion of increased safety: the great outdoors.

And so Harmon hit the streets. “I asked a friend if I could photograph them from outside their home,” he writes. “This led to posting an open invitation on social media and the project quickly grew to over 1,200 dwellings.” Luckily for Memphis and the world, Harmon is a photographer with a keen eye for flashes of character in the moment; his bio says he’s a visual anthropologist, and that’s closer to what he does with a camera. With it, he casts a wide net to capture the culture of Memphis in all its diversity: a multitude of porches, windows, apartments, garages, pets, and various states of parenthood reveal themselves from more or less the same zone — between the inside and the outside.

From only a few yards away or through double-paned glass, the distance is always there, looming in every image. A family crouching on a screened-in porch; young housemates gathered with their instruments just inside the door; a couple represented by two heads framed in separate windows; someone playing a guitar solo in green graduation robes; a porch-sitter obscured by the Memphis Flyer she’s reading, her dog alert. Yet all of them also feature another silent subject: the distance itself.

In each shot, Harmon puts himself into what anthropologists call liminal space, a realm betwixt and between different states of being. The photographer keeps his pandemically correct distance, yet simultaneously peers across it, illuminating those interior safe spaces to which we all retreated. Harmon occasionally keeps his spot flash in the frame, throwing light from just outside the window into the spaces where humans live. These pictures capture both how people defined a safe distance in those dark days, and how they defined the interior space of their bubble.

As Harmon was taking images and posting them on social media, just glimpsing them in a scroll was somehow hopeful, albeit ephemeral. Others first saw these portraits in Memphis magazine, or when exhibited by Crosstown Arts in February. But it takes the more contemplative space of a book in your lap to bring it home: Here was someone seeing all of us, bearing witness, even as we bore witness to the friends and neighbors we saw through Harmon’s work. In pairing strangers with more familiar faces, this book forges an all-embracing, democratic vision of who we were.

Writ large, the expressions lean toward the grim, the anxiety-ridden. They’re not unlike dignified 19th-century portraits where subjects presented themselves before the lens in stillness, with the gravitas of the ages. Yet others defy such seriousness of purpose, determined to keep some fun or beauty to their lives, through funny ears, pets, or mugging for the camera. Or, as with that person wearing a tyrannosaurus rex suit in their living room, through all of the above.

It’s a credit to the inventiveness of both Harmon and his subjects that the book presents hundreds of variations in setting, color, lighting, and mood. Some, like Ben Siler, Andria Brown, or Flyer alum Chris Davis, offer writings from or inspired by the time. But most of these portraits are resolutely anonymous, all of us reduced to that stalwart everyman or everywoman bent on survival. In a nod to the many who agreed to have their portrait published (some didn’t), Harmon lists the 814 folders of images in the order he shot them over two and a half months. They’re not meant to identify the subjects; they’re just another artifact of this anthropologist’s journey, from the outside to the inside in the click of a shutter.

Categories
Book Features Books

Tyler Keith’s “The Mark of Cain” Evokes Deepest, Darkest Florida

“I prayed, ‘Dear nothing, come into my life. Fill me with your infinite space. No one knows the size of your great nothingness. In nobody’s name, Amen.’” So says Ronnie Harrison, recalling his own loss of faith as his fellow ex-cons sing “I Saw the Light” at Camp Eden’s Wednesday prayer meeting in Gulf Breeze, Florida. In a deft touch capturing the complexity of the character, author Tyler Keith portrays Ronnie reflexively singing right along with the other denizens of the halfway house, even as his thoughts turn cold and nihilistic.

Keith, best known as the songwriter and guitarist behind such bands as The Neckbones, The Preacher’s Kids, and The Apostles, includes some fine character studies in his debut novel, The Mark of Cain (Cool Dog Sound), but none as subtle as the book’s protagonist. Yet, paradoxically, this very character is a cipher as the novel opens. Ronnie, freshly paroled from federal prison, begins the tale as a blank slate.

“I had nothing … I doubted if I was even me anymore. I’d put myself in suspended animation for so long I couldn’t remember who I used to be. All I knew was, that when the prison doors opened it also opened up a flood of the deepest pent-up emotions that’d I’d hidden away for so long.” So Ronnie muses, and as he allows memories in, so too does the reader learn of the tangled family web in which he is caught.

Most of the novel is set in Camp Eden, the combination ministry/rehabilitation program where Harrison eases back into life on the outside. Eden, a finely-drawn universe unto itself populated with ex-cons who never seem to go further than a halfway house, is a sorry excuse for freedom, a kind of purgatory from which Ronnie can’t escape. But it nonetheless is a perch from which he can avoid the real danger zone: Holmes County, where family ties offer no salvation, only a return to his former life of crime.

“You’ve heard of the three M’s of Holmes County?” one character asks. “Moonshine, marijuana, and methamphetamines.” Presiding over the county, trafficking all of the above and owning the local judges, is the shadowy figure of Uncle Albert. The kingpin is made all the more threatening by his absence, as Ronnie negotiates living as a free man while steering clear of his compromised family past. It all seems safely at arm’s length until a certain Travis Campbell, with close ties to Uncle Albert, shows up at Eden, trying to coax him back into his former life.

Meanwhile, Ronnie’s preoccupied with his other former life, his ex-wife Tammy and their now grown daughter Tina. Wracked with guilt over his lost years in prison, he clings to them as his one hope for a straight life. A failure as a dad, he broods over his own father, a preacher who, the story goes, disappeared early in Ronnie’s life. Such bouts of longing and regret reveal Ronnie at his most sympathetic, drawing us down his inexorable road back to Holmes County and his past.

The language here is basic yet evocative. Keith, who grew up in north Florida, conjures up the landscape and its people as only a native can. Even when the hard boiled, matter-of-fact prose descends into cliched sentiments of the heart — “Tammy was the only woman I ever really loved” — one can hear Ronnie’s credible voice behind it. If the characters think in cliches, that’s just another prison, constraining them to courses of action that take on their own logic.

That’s what makes this a compelling page-turner that, in the grand tradition of Jim Thompson, elevates the noir thriller into loftier realms of literature. Our hapless narrator’s default approach to life is to “just let it all happen,” a passivity that has only led him to prison and a trail of broken relationships. But his time at Camp Eden, however corrupt and confining, leads him, through the unfettered violence of the final pages, to confront his own past and find some kind of redemption. Even that is broken, somehow, but he’ll take it.

Tyler Keith will read from his new novel (with Mississippi author Tim Lee) at Goner Records, Saturday, December 17, 5:30 p.m.

Categories
Book Features Books

Censoring History

Author Alice Faye Duncan (Photo: Alice Faye Duncan)

“That was first time in my life that I saw a living writer. I assumed most of them were dead.” Alice Faye Duncan recalls the day in the sixth grade at Snowden Elementary School in Memphis that the poet Etheridge Knight spoke to her class. Duncan, the child of two educators, was the one walking around with “oodles” of journals, filled with poems and short stories. It was that day her life changed. After that, “I told anyone who would listen, ‘I’m going to be a writer.’”

Today, Duncan is an award winner, the author of 12 books, including her latest, Yellow Dog Blues, the story of a boy and his runaway dog, the Blues Trail, and Beale Street. The New York Times and the New York Public Library have honored the book (with illustrations by Caldecott Medal-winner Chris Raschka) as one of the Best Illustrated among children’s books published in 2022. Duncan’s writing is considered to be in line for awards as well.

Now, Duncan’s 2018 book, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, has been pulled into a growing controversy — the banning of books aimed at young readers in conservative-leaning states. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop received a Coretta Scott King Books For Children Honor Medal in 2019, but since January it has been banned “pending investigation” by the Duval County (Jacksonville, Florida) Board of Education. Speaking on the WKNO-TV series A Conversation With (available at wkno.org), Duncan calls book-banning “anti-intellectual” and “unhealthy” and says it “contributes to the dumbing down of America.”

Duncan’s book is one of almost 200 on the Duval County banned book list. Calls and emails to the Board of Education have not been answered. According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, more than 1,600 titles have been banned or restricted in libraries across America.

Tennessee, through what’s called the Age-Appropriate Materials Act, is one of the states leading the movement to restrict student access to certain books. The act, signed into law in April by Governor Bill Lee, requires “each public school to maintain and post on the school’s website, a list of materials in the school’s library collection.”

While the new Tennessee law is aimed at screening “obscene materials or materials harmful to minors,” the study by PEN America estimates that at least 40 percent of bans nationwide “are connected to either proposed or enacted legislation” or from “political pressure to restrict the teaching or presence of certain books or concepts.” Among those concepts is racism. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop looks at the ill-fated 1968 strike by sanitation workers from the point of view of a 9-year-old girl, whose father is one of the strikers.

Another of Duncan’s books, Evicted!: The Struggle For The Right To Vote, also published in 2022, chronicles the story of voter registration drives led by Black people in Fayette County, Tennessee, starting in the 1950s.

“My mission is to write books to leave a record for the children who weren’t there,” she says. “Because if we don’t share the history as we are seeing it, people will say it never happened.”

Duncan has three other books currently in the works and says she won’t allow censorship to affect what she writes, or how. You can learn more about Alice Faye Duncan and her books at alicefayeduncan.com.

Categories
Book Features Books

Corey Mesler Exposed!

Corey Mesler (Photo: Sandra McDougall-Mitchell)

Prolific novelist Corey Mesler (he’s written 14 of them) and I sat down toward the back of Burke’s Book Store (he owns it) to discuss his latest publication.

“Let’s talk about your book,” I said. “It’s just filthy.”

“I knew you’d lead with that,” he said, dryly.

How could I not? Mesler gleefully says that he was moved to write the book because of perversity: “I got tired of people saying, well, ‘There’s too much sex in your books.’ So I doubled down on it and decided to write a book that tells a man’s life through his psychosexual experiences. I wanted to make him come alive, mostly through his sexual encounters. And I used my own life to give it structure.”

It’s not a tell-all, however. He qualifies it by saying it’s based on his own experiences, but “many, many things were made up. I wasn’t as much of a stud as the guy in the book.”

So maybe we can blame Neill Rhymer, the guy in the book who gets so much action, for some of the reaction. There’s a site called Chapter 16 (chapter16.org) that is funded by Humanities Tennessee and reports on literary news and events in the state. It also reviews books, including several of Mesler’s earlier works.

But not this one. It does get a mention in an item named Briefly Noted, but all that sex business gave the outfit pause since it gets public funding. Better to be safe than explicit.

Mesler is unbowed.

“I love women. I love sex. I have a standard thing that I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: I write about sex because sex is good and it’s the life force. When you tap into writing, you’re looking for the life force — the chi as they call it. Sex points toward nothing but good. I think it’s positive. I can’t think of anything bad about it.”

It has taken him some seven years to write and publish Cock-A-Hoop: the Adventures, Mostly, of Neill Rhymer, partly because it was too long for his usual publisher to handle. So Mesler found Whiskey Tit Press and was reassured that they weren’t going to be bothered by the sexy stuff. The publisher’s mission statement begins this way: “Whiskey Tit attempts to restore degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts.”

Mesler is a writing machine, with all the novels, all the poetry, and a film script to his credit. Not bad for someone who says he “backed into” writing novels. Still, he admits to some anxiety. “I still feel like I’m sitting at the kids’ table.”

He says that for decades he wrote poetry and “it was pretty bad. I was looking up to Fredric Koeppel and Bill Page and Gordon Osing and thinking, I’ll never be as good as those guys. Then I read Raymond Carver and decided maybe I can write a short story.”

But Mesler wasn’t sure about writing prose. “The sustaining of the voice and all that was really hard for me,” he said. “I backed into it by creating my first novel totally in dialogue talk. I thought it was just this funny thing that I was having fun doing. It was a gas to write, and I found my strength, which, I think, is dialogue.”

He looked up online to see how long a novel was and found out a novel is 40,000 words; anything under that is a novella. “I had 45,000 words, so, okay, it’s a novel.”

But then what? “I thought, well, this is a queer bird. Who’s gonna go with me on this?” As it happened, Joe Taylor at Livingston Press loved Talk: A Novel in Dialogue and published it.

So he’s been at it ever since, with his 2015 book Memphis Movie being the bestselling of his works. And if Cock-A-Hoop is the latest to hit shelves, it’s not his most recent work. “I think I’ve published at least two novels that I wrote after this.”

Meanwhile, he’s still at it with another novel that veers into biography. “It’s coming hard,” he acknowledges. “I’m older and I’m tired. And it’s about some parts of my life that are very difficult. I didn’t think I was scared to write about it, but apparently I am.”

Yet he’ll do it no matter what, even if he has to back into it.

Categories
Book Features Books

Through a Blue-Eyed Lens

When I moved to Memphis in 1988, I took a position as a warehouse clerk. My Mississippi-born supervisor was a “polite” racist: She’d lower her voice to a whisper when she said the words “Black people.” It was my earliest lesson in how white supremacy perpetuated itself with good manners.

Today, both Yankees like me and Memphians who’ve embraced multicultural values must grapple with such irksome mores, but because they’re often only whispered, those grappling can feel isolated. That’s why Shelley E. Moore’s new memoir, Through a Blue-Eyed Lens: Reflections, Snapshots, Pinholes in Black and White Memphis 1962-1972 (Alchemy Media), is so valuable.

Moore, a white woman raised in Wyoming, Georgia, and Kansas before landing in Memphis at age 8, provides the perfect outsider’s perspective on such mores during the height of the Civil Rights movement. She fearlessly delves into matters of racial relations, as the book zeroes in on them as its central theme. After turning 18, she went on to life adventures elsewhere, but, as she writes, “I have no intention of detailing those decades.” Rather, she’s leaned in to the need to confront her formative years here, equal parts enlightening, troubling, and traumatizing. As such, the volume is a rare social history of a city in turmoil, as experienced by a teenager.

It’s a little-explored window into the city’s official history as well: The author’s father, Jerry Moore, came to here to serve as senior city planner, ultimately becoming the city’s chief administrative officer under Mayor Henry Loeb in 1968. As Moore writes, “I, and many others, have questioned how Jerry reconciled working directly under a man who was an avowed segregationist and obstructionist.” While he doesn’t have much of a voice in this work, Jerry and his wife Sonya hover in the background as “liberally progressive people” who set the tone for their children’s worldview, often at odds with the assumptions of white Memphis.

The resulting culture shock runs the gamut from innocent confusion to outrage to sheer terror. At first, Moore notices the egregious commonalities of segregation — “No White People Allowed in Zoo Today” — but finer details make racial politics more vivid as she matures. When a teenaged Moore naively applies to work as a house cleaner, she’s told, “We only hire Colored maids.”

Significantly, Moore saw the desegregation of schools as it happened. She writes it was “poorly executed,” and the Memphis School Board was “not invested in the process.” But her experience of it went deeper, as she began dating Dwain, a fellow eighth-grader at Bellevue Junior High School who happened to be Black. Even as she learned new dance moves to Stax 45s, she writes, “I was effectively and immediately ditched by my closest white girlfriends. Almost overnight, I became a pariah.”

From there, Moore’s clash with the city’s most reactionary elements only worsened. The story’s bolstered with passages penned by her mother, siblings, classmates, and Dwain himself, the son of a respected Black clergyman. Letters she wrote and received in those years are inserted into the narrative, lending multiple perspectives. All of these voices confirm that, even then, Moore and her family were part of a larger progressive community. But that only made the violence of the era more impactful.

One day after Moore’s mother, siblings, and family friends attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appearance at Mason Temple, and even as Dwain’s family prepared a meal for King in their home that night, he was assassinated. With Mayor Loeb unreachable by phone, it was Moore’s father who personally found him and told him the news.

It was Jerry Moore who represented the city in negotiations with the sanitation workers that King had come to champion. Yet that’s almost an afterthought in this profoundly personal story of privilege mixed with personal risk. Even her father’s clout could not prevent death threats from the White Citizens’ Council, triggered by her interracial dating. Having thus had her feet held to the fire, readers will sympathize with her desire to simply leave when she came of age. We’re lucky she’s come back now, decades later, to confront the demons of racism that still haunt her, and all of us.

Categories
Book Features Books

Tara M. Stringfellow Launches Memphis at Novel Bookstore

Author Tara M. Stringfellow is a poet, a traveler, a former attorney, a Memphian, and she will launch her debut novel — Memphis — Tuesday, April 5th, with an event at Novel bookstore.

The novel follows three generations of Black women living in Memphis. It’s at once a family saga, a story of the power of art, and a deeply political social commentary. There is much pain in Memphis, but there is hope and triumph as well. It is a heart-wrenching, inspiring, moving novel. And to write it, Stringfellow drew on both her imagination and her own experiences.

“Kind of like my main character in the book, I moved here full-time when I was 10 [years old],” Stringfellow says. Before moving here, she remembers phone calls with family members in Memphis; until she was 10 years old, Stringfellow lived in Okinawa, Japan. Her father, who is also a poet, was a Marine at the time. The author says the beauty of her childhood surroundings and her connection to family in Memphis helped nourish her love for poetry. And her work as a poet suffuses every page of her debut novel.

Also like Joan, the main character in Memphis, Stringfellow says that she has strong ties to her old neighborhood in North Memphis. “Douglass kind of raised me for a bit, and I loved it,” she remembers. Community is a powerful force in her novel, as exemplified by this passage: “All of Douglass—the teenagers in love, the tired working men, the even more tired womenfolk—all of them stood on the steps of the porch Myron had built for Hazel, stood on the lawn, climbed up the branches of the magnolia and found seats where they could. The people in the neighborhood stood watch that night.”

Stringfellow finished writing the novel after returning to Memphis following the early months of the Covid pandemic. She says it felt right to complete it here. When she finished the book, she couldn’t help but think, “What has my family given for me to get here?”

In Memphis, Joan is a young painter whose love for her art both grounds her through some turbulent trials, and might eventually lead her away from Memphis. “I do connect to Joan in that way,” she says. “My passion for writing, I wanted her to have the same passion for art.” Stringfellow says she believes that Joan will carry Memphis with her wherever she goes. “Memphis will always be there in her home. And sometimes we have to leave home, to go to school or go somewhere. And I feel like it’s so nice to come back home.”

Though she has lived in other cities, states, and countries since her childhood, and though she lives in a different neighborhood now that she’s back in Memphis, Stringfellow is quick to profess her affection for the city from which her novel takes its name. “I love my neighborhood,” she says. “All my neighbors are real diverse, and we all just kind of take care of each other. I really do love living in Memphis.” Look for a longer interview with the author in the near future in the pages of the Flyer.

Tara M. Stringfellow is at Novel, Tuesday, April 5th, 6 p.m.

Categories
Book Features Books

Good Reads: Trouble the Waters

The Bluff City’s fans of speculative fiction have a new reason to rejoice in the recently released Trouble the Waters: Tales From the Deep Blue (Third Man Books) edited by Pan Morigan and Memphians Sheree Renée Thomas and Troy L. Wiggins. The anthology is mesmerizing, a collection sparkling with a myriad of voices, some plumbing the depths of the mystic while others cast their gaze on the far-off future.

Thomas and Wiggins are no strangers to sci-fi and speculative fiction. Both writers contributed to last year’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda prose anthology, and Thomas is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction. In this newest work, water is the unifying motif. Like water itself — freezing, fogging, fluidly expanding to fill any space — the stories within take many shapes.

“The Water Creatures in my own story,” writes Thomas in the collection’s introduction, “remind us that while the earth is round, her waters are vast and deep. We may never know all the strange, wondrous life-forms teeming below.”

In Thomas’ “Love Hangover,” the protagonist, Frankie, fawns over a siren-like singer. “Like Delilah Divine’s voice, the music was sweet water finding its own way home,” Thomas writes. “The challenge was finding a way to listen and not get drenched. With Delilah you drowned.” In the short story, as in much of Thomas’ work, music is tied to the life force; drum beats are like heartbeats (check out her collection Nine Bar Blues, which is populated by dancers, DJs, and other musical magic). The story culminates with the 1979 fire at the Infinity disco, as the author deftly balances the forces of water and fire.

Memphian Danian Darrell Jerry’s “A City Called Heaven” conjures images of epidemic in Memphis. It begins with Sibyl walking west along Beale Street, trodding familiar ground. Beneath the specter of disease, a desire for life takes root, but the question is how to hold on to that life. Music and religion, two of the city’s driving forces, figure prominently in the story.

In “Seven Generations Algorithm” by Andrea Hairston, though the future may be bleak, with the gulf between the haves and have-nots as apparent as it is today, song and story still offer a saving grace. “Refugees, squatters, and former desperadoes were pitching tents in dead big-box stores, hoping for miracles: jobs, food, electricity, a plan, a vision — maybe just cheap cell service,” Hairston writes. Meanwhile, the author and playwright continues, “Folks who could were locked up tight down in the valley behind a flood wall and megawatt gates. Electric Paradise was on the other side of the Mall — a waste of power and good river valley soil.”

Speaking over the phone, Memphian Jamey Hatley tells me about her story, “Spirits Don’t Cross Over ’Til They Do,” which follows a veteran of the Vietnam War, Rabbit, as he tries to find a place for himself. Rabbit has seen too much death, too little reason for hope. He was in Memphis when Otis Redding died, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

“How do survivors return?” Hatley asks. “There used to be rights of passage if you were a warrior. You would go through this process to be reacclimated into the community. Even now we’re having all these talks about how our veterans are not being taken care of, how the waiting lists for mental healthcare are incredibly long. … How do you try to make yourself whole?”

Featuring authors from familiar environs such as Memphis and New Orleans, but as far away as Northern Ireland and Copenhagen, and casting a net into the world of myth and memory, of foresight and prophecy for inspiration, Trouble the Waters is as beautiful and frightening and changing as the sea itself. Poetry, magic, and Afrofuturism inform the stories within, bidding the reader to drift away, borne aloft on a sea of story, to awake on a strange and wondrous shore.

Categories
Book Features Books

Going to Graceland: Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, At Last

Margaret Renkl (Photo: Heidi Ross)

If the last weeks of the year are good for anything, it makes for a fine time to catch up on reading. One of my favorite recent reads is the newest collection, Graceland, At Last (Milkweed Editions), by Nashville-based author Margaret Renkl.

Drawn from Renkl’s op-ed column in The New York Times, the essays in the collection explore the politics and religion, ecology and environment, and art and culture of the South.

One feels that Renkl understands the South, or, perhaps paradoxically, she knows that the South defies explanation. “I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either, because in truth there’s no such thing as ‘the South,’” she writes. “The persistent and pervasive notion of this place as a homogeneous region, a conservative voting bloc, is as much a product of the American media’s imagination as any episode of The Dukes of Hazzard.”

I had the chance to speak with her about family, America’s obsession with lawns, and the time she finally made it to Graceland (at last). — Jesse Davis

Memphis Flyer: In the acknowledgements of Graceland, At Last, you write about censorship of the student magazine and how that event prompted you to leave the South, if only for a time. What makes that feel like a familiar story?

Margaret Renkl: I wouldn’t want to speak for other writers, but for me the answer has something to do with simply getting older, I think. As a very young woman, I thought leaving the South would mean leaving behind everything the South so often gets wrong. What I learned in my brief time away is that every place gets crucial things very wrong — racism, for instance, is not a uniquely Southern trait — and that leaving home wasn’t going to mean finding Shangri-La. More to the point, it’s possible to love what we get right here without forgiving what we get wrong. Maybe I realized I’d rather work toward a better South than be an expatriate forever. Or maybe I was just homesick.

Can you talk a little bit about the title for the collection?

I wanted those words to convey a subtle sense of movement, even progress. In the South we are moving — slowly and not at all directly — toward the goodness I truly believe we are capable of.

To me, the “New” in “New South” really means “Newly Visible.” The South is incredibly diverse, but that diversity hasn’t always been reflected in the “moonshine and magnolias” aspects of the region’s art, literature, and reporting.

I think it’s worth making a distinction between the way the South is represented nationally and the way it’s represented here at home. I also think it’s worth noting, with any show or story or song, who the target audience is.

As a rule, mainstream productions — those aimed at an audience untroubled by stereotypes, even invested in stereotypes — rely on one of two Southern tropes: the rural idyll of church potlucks and cool green swimming holes, or the open racism and outright brutality of the Jim Crow era.

Such representations, of course, aren’t entirely fictional.

But the South, as you point out, is also more urban, more culturally and ethnically diverse, more artistically innovative than such stereotypes allow. And there are far more homegrown novelists and journalists and songwriters and poets and playwrights who are working to highlight that diversity and who are adding to that innovation than I could possibly enumerate in this space, or even in a weekly column.

Would you talk a little bit about your use of your family members’ wedding rings as “talismans against fear” on your book tour? That was such a moving piece.
It’s easy for me to forget that much of what I experience as stress is something my ancestors — who survived wars and droughts and floods and fires and every imaginable kind of medical crisis — would have found almost laughable. Wearing their wedding rings reminds me to set my own worries into a bigger context.

Categories
Book Features Books Memphis Gaydar

Body Language: Carmen Maria Machado in Memphis

Carmen Maria Machado (Credit: Art Streiber / AUGUST)

This week, Memphis will be graced with a reading by a world-class author of fiction and memoir — Carmen Maria Machado. The author will give a reading at the University of Memphis, along with a lecture on craft, and we had the honor of an interview in advance of her visit. 

In Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, she defies genre and writes stories that read like fables and urban legends. “At first everyone blamed the fashion industry, then the millennials, and, finally, the water,” Machado writes in “Real Women Have Bodies,” in which an epidemic has young girls fading away, to translucence and then to nothing. Even though pandemics and climate change and words like “millennials” root the collection in the present moment, there’s an air of timelessness to it as well, as if these stories have always been told somewhere, in some form. 

In a sense they have. These are tales of girls and women who have been taught to fear, and of how it feels to fully inhabit a body, to feel love and lust, to be the madwoman in one’s own attic.

Her Body and Other Parties

Memphis Flyer: Have you always been a reader? Have you always been interested in stories?

Carmen Maria Machado: Yes, I was a reader from the very beginning. My parents were not huge readers themselves but very much believed in the value of reading — someone read to me every night, whether it was my mom or dad or my great-grandmother. 

When did you begin writing?
As soon as I could pick up a pencil, I was writing my own stories and poems, often riffing on writers I loved (like Roald Dahl and Shel Silverstein). 

“Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.” I was really struck by those lines in “The Husband Stitch.” Can you talk about the importance of stories in that piece? 
“The Husband Stitch” is a story about stories; the stories we tell ourselves to survive, to be happy, to make sense of a world determined not to make sense. But stories are also unruly; they can shift and evolve, come to mean things you wouldn’t expect, take on new context. Ultimately, it’s a story about how stories can’t save us. 

I know people who make lists to help with anxiety, and I couldn’t help thinking about them when I read “Inventory.” Does the narrator focus on these details to help banish the pandemic in the story to the margins? 
I think so? I’m also a list-maker and I’ve always been fascinated by the form; how you can see around a list, or use it to play with foregrounding and backgrounding as a literary technique. 

I notice that sometimes your characters are unnamed. What made you decide to leave their names unspoken?
I think it’s because I write a lot of first-person stories and I don’t always think of my protagonist as someone who needs to be named.

Much of the collection seems rooted in the physicality of women’s bodies. What is the significance of the disappearing girls and women in “Real Women Have Bodies”? The title seems to draw a line toward supposedly body-positive messaging that nonetheless excludes many women — and is rooted in consumerism and fetishization of women, rather than in reality. Am I way off the mark here?
No! This is one of many stories of mine that directly came from its title. I was thinking about the phrase “real women have curves,” which (as you say) comes from a body-positive place but is fundamentally broken as a philosophy. I remember thinking, “Real women have bodies,” and then liking it as a phrase, and writing it down. Eventually the story just unspooled from there. 

Since the upcoming event at the University of Memphis will have a craft interview component, I want to talk a little bit about your process. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to be a working writer today?
I have been incredibly lucky; I’m pretty much having a dream career as a writer in every respect. The fact that I can support myself with my writing is truly incredible, and I get to dive into passion projects constantly. That being said, a lot of writers don’t have that luxury; being a working writer can be extremely difficult, and in the U.S. we have so little support for artists. And trying to do all of it during a pandemic and climate crisis? It’s amazing anything gets written at all. 

Is there anything you’ve learned about writing (and querying, submitting, etc.) that you wish you had known when you were younger?
There’s no rush to submit or publish. Make the best work you can make; the rest will come later. 

I was fortunate enough to get to interview Tayari Jones a few years ago, and she told me, “I believe that people with the most important stories don’t have time to write every day.” Would you agree with that?
That’s a very bold statement! I agree with the sentiment if not the sentence itself. Certainly people whose lives don’t permit them massive swaths of time to write every day have stories worth telling, and we would be a better society if we supported them. (Also, the idea that one has to write every day to be successful is very silly; I don’t write every day, and I never have.)

Is there anything else you would like to talk about or make sure readers know?Nope! Thank you so much — I can’t wait to come to Memphis.

Carmen Maria Machado will give a reading of her work on Thursday, November 11, at 6:30 p.m. in the University of Memphis UC Theatre. She will  give a craft interview the next day at noon in Patterson Hall 456. Both are free and open to the public.

In the Dream House
Categories
Book Features Books

This House Ain’t a Home: Kate Cayley’s Householders

Kate Cayley (Photo: Carmen Farrell)

At a time when once-in-a-lifetime climate catastrophes are more and more commonplace, where each election is framed as a battle for the nation’s soul, it’s understandable that salvation is an idea with no little allure. So it’s no surprise that Kate Cayley’s Householders (Biblioasis), which the acknowledgments point out the author edited in March 2020, is a short story collection much preoccupied with salvation.

In Cayley’s collection of haunting short stories, mothers attempt to save daughters from the evils of contemporary living, and then from scarcity and hunger; daughters attempt to save mothers from lonely deaths in antiseptic nursing homes; and there is even a woman who disguises herself as a nun.

The stories in Householders form an interconnected narrative. Some tell parts of a larger story through a lens that spans decades and different perspectives, while others are connected only tangentially.

The first story in the collection, “The Crooked Man,” is one of the latter. It tells of a gentrifying neighborhood and stands as a warning against assumptions. With a struggling family working to make ends meet and to make a place for themselves, there’s a whiff of Sarah Langan’s fabulous Good Neighbors in some of the plot turns and settings, but Cayley makes the story all her own.

Her characters are often portrayed at extremes — living on a religious commune, engrossed in the self-contained world of academia, surviving on welfare and at the edge of town in a trailer slowly being reclaimed by the hills. Sometimes they live two lives, like the protagonist of “Pilgrims,” one of the most immediately compelling stories in the collection, in which the unnamed protagonist poses as a nun for an online blog. Her life can be divided into sections, a clearly demarcated before and after, and then there is the saintly life of Sister Bernadette, distinct from the protagonist’s actual identity.

“She wanted to be offered a pure sympathy,” Cayley writes in “Pilgrims.” “Now she wanted people, but no one she actually knew, because they knew her as herself—shy, not always truthful, envious of whatever she was not, stupid about men.”

If salvation and forgiveness are motifs of Householders, so, too, are past lives and former identities. Often, Cayley’s characters, flawed but sympathetic, feel they must jettison versions of themselves to be saved, whether spiritually or in a more tangible, mundane way. Several of the stories follow Naomi (formerly known as Nancy) and her daughter Trout. The two are inhabitants and, later, refugees from the religious commune known as the Other Kingdom. Both worlds offer something the other lacks. Naomi doesn’t miss the mindless consumption of contemporary society while living in the Other Kingdom, but she worries that they may never do better than subsist there. Back in the city, she misses the closeness of the commune, the feeling of family, but she can at least eat a full meal.

Eventually, the Covid pandemic makes its way onto the pages of Householders, often mentioned in passing, almost on the margins. At the Other Kingdom, Saul believes the pandemic is a sign of the end times, but Trout thinks that little in life is so obviously divided into phases — the beginning, the end. “Outside, away from their rarefied stale air, she’d come to feel that everything was not so decisive. That everything that pulled one way also pulled in another.”

In Householders, people leave often, but some people stay. Forgiveness is much sought after but rarely given freely, so Cayley writes with a passion that seems to extend that longed-for forgiveness to her characters when they cannot bring themselves to do it for themselves. People are pulled one way, but also in another, and, as in life, find themselves somewhere between extremes.