Tag: Burke’s Book Store

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Talking to the Tillinghast brothers.

Richard Tillinghast and David Tillinghast are brothers, poets, and children of Memphis. Richard is the author of Journeys Into the Mind: A Book of Places. David is the author of Sisters, Cousins, and Wayward Angels. In advance of their signing in Memphis, I was able to corner the Tillinghasts and ask them a few questions. They are eloquent — and loquacious — fellas.

Memphis Flyer: What was it like growing up with two writers in the house? Did both of you know you were going to be poets early on, and did you read each other’s work? Any competition there?

David: From the start, Richard knew that he would be a writer. My interests lay in other areas, such as sports and girls. I enjoyed hunting and fishing, while Richard was concentrating scholastically. I joined the Navy. I saw lots of the world.

Certainly, there is no competition because that’s in bad taste.

Richard: Competition? Well, of course, all siblings compete with each other, but in this case I would say not so much. In my last couple of years in high school, David was in the Navy and off at college, so we weren’t at home together. I don’t think at that time it was clear to either of us that we’d be poets. I was taking classes with Mr. Callicott and playing drums in a band, and my ambitions were to be a painter and/or a drummer.

I was still playing in bands [when] I went off to Sewanee, and it was only there that it became clear to me I wanted to write poetry and make my living as a college professor.

I’ve known the Tillinghast name for as long as I’ve been a bookseller, and I was told long ago that you are Memphians. Tell me the particulars and what Memphis means to you.

David: Memphis is our hometown, historical as well as actual; our 1888 home on South Cox was way out in the country then. Mother and her two brothers went to Central High School. My grandfather, A. J. Williford, was a prominent attorney in Memphis. I remember hot, sweaty summer nights eating watermelon at the Pig and Whistle. Some of us boys would ride our bicycles to the Malco Theater to watch Randolph Scott. Some afternoons, I would take the street car up to the Falls Building on Front Street where my father had an office.

Richard: Yes, even with the old New England name of Tillinghast, David and I are both Memphians. This identification gets stronger and stronger for me as I get older and now spend my summers at Sewanee.

Our father was a New England Yankee, and our earliest American ancestor came to Rhode Island in 1640. The Williford side of the family has been in West Tennessee since before the Civil War. When you grow up in Memphis, that’s what you are, a Memphian and a Southerner. Though I have traveled all over the world, I am very proud to be from Memphis. David and I both graduated from Central High. I was among those who hung out with Furry Lewis. Bill Eggleston was a friend, and his work epitomizes something important about our region, as do the paintings of Carroll Cloar and Burton Callicott. Jesse Winchester as a singer and songwriter, the great historian Shelby Foote, and Peter Taylor as a friend and mentor are also Memphians whose work means a lot to me.

And my favorite question to ask writers: whom do you read and, if apropos, who influenced you?

David: Of the yonder writers, there is Homer’s Odyssey; the letters of Peter Abelard to Heloise; and of course, passages from Shakespeare, the old English ballads. Moving sketchily forward, there is Bobby Burns, James Whitcomb Riley, Winston Churchill’s histories, W. H. Auden. The Georgian poets of the first war: Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke. Erich Maria Remarque, John Steinbeck’s stories, Hemingway. On a more immediate level, I was influenced by my mentors George Garrett and James Dickey, not stylistically, but through our everyday contact, which eventually developed into friendship.

Richard: What do I read? Here is my summer reading: Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks. Dennis Covington’s riveting Salvation on Sand Mountain. Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty. Two books by Sewanee graduate Jon Meacham: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and Franklin and Winston. The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court by Peter Taylor. And I’m re-reading “The Bear” by the greatest of them all, William Faulkner.

Richard and David Tillinghast booksigning at Burke’s Book Store Thursday, July 13th at 5:30 p.m.

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Action!

CREDIT: Sandra McDougall-Mitchell

Actor Peter Coyote calls Corey Mesler’s Memphis Movie (Soft Skull Press) “spot-on” in its re-creation of what it takes to make a movie. But what Coyote maybe doesn’t know is that Mesler — co-owner, with wife Cheryl, of Burke’s Book Store — went into this, his eighth novel, with only a vague idea of what he was doing.

“I read a few books for background,” Mesler told the Flyer. “But, honestly, I had no idea whether my depiction of a film set, film folks, or the entire film milieu was at all accurate, until Peter Coyote and [actor and former Memphian] Chris Ellis both told me I nailed it.”

Courtney Love, you might say, started it years ago. According to Mesler: “She came into the bookstore with an entourage. I thought, This is strange. This is not usually how a day in Memphis progresses.

Sandra McDougall-Mitchell

Corey Mesler

“I started Memphis Movie like I start all my novels: with an amorphous idea of what I’m doing. When the character of Eric Warberg began taking shape is when I thought I might be onto something good.”

Warberg, a onetime Hollywood success story but with a few recent flops under his belt, is Memphis Movie‘s central character, and he’s returned to his hometown, Memphis, to get his directing career back on track. How? By making a movie. About what? Even Warberg isn’t so sure. But no problem. The action in Memphis Movie is more off the set than on, and so is most of his cast and crew — on the make and bedding every which way.

Chaotic, crazed? That describes the action in Memphis Movie, and Mesler said so. But he also recalled his role as an extra when the Metropolitan Opera, on tour, would come to town: “I hate opera, but backstage it was exhilarating. I was struck by how chaotic and crazed and downright ornery it was behind the curtain, and then, suddenly, when the action moved out onto the stage, it was magic aborning. There was an artistic whoosh. Beauty from chaos. Hey, there’s my theme in Memphis Movie!”

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Jim Bailey’s The End of Healing

Is Dr. Jim Bailey in any way Dr. Don Newman? Bailey, professor of medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, says in two respects definitely not. Newman, resident physician and protagonist in Bailey’s novel, The End of Healing, is, for one thing, “much better-looking,” according to Bailey. And another thing: Newman once played football.

But Bailey’s being asked the question a lot: Just how autobiographical is The End of Healing? It’s an obvious question to ask, whether the author’s here in Memphis or on the road, including recent signings in Annapolis, Birmingham, and Knoxville.

Bailey says he’s been thrilled by reader response to the novel, but he’s been a little surprised to hear the book compared to works by Dan Brown and John Grisham — and yes, there’s a little of each author in the novel’s conspiratorial subplots. More striking, Bailey’s heard The End of Healing compared to Ayn Rand — and yes, there are lengthy philosophical discussions in these pages too.

Those discussions are headed by Dr. Gil Sampson as he leads his three seminar participants in a course that questions how health care in America does and does not work. Bruce Markhum is a star surgeon in the making but with his eye on the financial bottom line. Frances Hunt is a talented nurse practitioner who isn’t quite sure where to put her trust in today’s health-care system. And Don Newman is having a crisis of conscience, both professionally and personally.

“My goal was to write a story that exposed some of the dark underside of modern health care, which is not always working for the patient’s benefit,” Bailey says, and continues:

“I also wanted to write in a way that was accessible to everyone, to tell an engaging story, but also a story that sees through all the rhetoric to see both sides: health-care workers and patients. It’s the story of every young, idealistic healer who, faced with the hard realities, finds it difficult to be true to the oath he or she has taken.”

Thus, Newman’s crisis of conscience, which Bailey says he’s seen time and again in his work with medical students and resident physicians at UT. Bailey calls it a process of disillusionment that comes after witnessing a system that sometimes separates health-care workers from the very people they were trained to serve: the sick. But Bailey is not without hope:

“There is hope at the end of The End of Healing, just as I see hope in the idealistic young healers I teach. I also see it in the innovative, caring people inside the insurance and pharmaceutical industries who want to put patients first. Yes, my book is hard on every component of the health-care industry, but there are people in that industry who do want to be part of the solution.”

Part of the solution lies in the classroom, and it’s been heartening for Bailey to see his novel already used in the sociology-of-medicine coursework at Ole Miss and Rhodes College. The dean of the school of public health at the University of Alabama-Birmingham has even called The End of Healing one of the best summaries of health-care policy he’s found.

As with reader response, such positive support from colleagues has thrilled Bailey too. What doesn’t please him in today’s headlines is the faulty perspective granted to Ebola by the media. Compare that plague (and Bailey certainly doesn’t deny the gravity of it) to a plague that is already widespread in America and the source of so much suffering. It’s what the wise Dr. Sampson at the end of The End of Healing calls “the plague of plenty,” which helps to account for this country’s high incidence of obesity, which in turn too often leads to cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Should the focus be on a medicine to end the plague of plenty? As with Ebola, Bailey believes a cure won’t come until we also eliminate the social conditions, environmental factors, and human behaviors that allow for it in the first place, and addressing the national emergency on all fronts should be one, to quote a phrase, end of healing.

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Music Music Features

Amy Rigby & Wreckless Eric at Burke’s Book Store

Brit Wreckless Eric was a lesser-known member of the late-’70s Stiff Records scene that launched the careers of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe and is most associated with his enduring single “The Whole Wide World.” Yank Amy Rigby was an indie-rock wife in the ’80s (married to dB’s drummer Will Rigby), who launched a brilliant but under-recognized solo career in the ’90s. In the past decade, they found each other, becoming musical and life partners. Eric and Rigby are cult artists, and I’m not sure how much their cults intersected before they brought them together, but I’m an enthusiastic Rigby partisan — helpless devotee, really. Rigby specializes in smart, funny, concrete folk-rock songs about domesticity, under-employment, parenthood, romance, sex, and other everyday concerns, put across with a charmingly fizzy voice and bull’s-eye phrasing. Her five solo albums between 1996’s Diary of a Mod Housewife and 2005’s Little Fugitive comprise a body of work that boasts more ace new songs in that sturdy musical vein than perhaps any other songwriter in that period. Think of her as a cross between Todd Snider and Rosanne Cash. Together, Eric and Rigby released a strong if too haphazardly recorded duo debut in 2008 and followed it up with Two-Way Family Favorites, a batch of covers ranging from familiar hits to more personal obscurities. They hit town this week touring in support of a third duo album, the all-original A Working Museum, which releases on October 30th. Amy Rigby & Wreckless Eric will play Burke’s Book Store in Cooper-Young at 7 p.m. on Sunday, October 28th. The show is free, but donations will be accepted.

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Write On

CREDIT: burkesbooks.com

“I know, I know. I publish too much. I hear that from friends.”

That’s Corey Mesler, co-owner with his wife Cheryl of Burke’s Book Store, speaking, and he has a point. In addition to the nearly two dozen story and poetry collections and novels published over the years, Mesler has a book of stories called Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories due this summer. He’s also got a couple of chapbooks that may appear before then. But for the time being, there are these: Before the Great Troubling, a career-spanning collection of Mesler’s poetry published by Unbound Content (with a cover illustration by Memphian Rebecca Tickle), and the anthology Good Poems, American Places (Viking), selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor and drawn from Keillor’s daily radio show, The Writer’s Almanac.

That show is where one could have heard Keillor reading Mesler’s “Sweet Annie Divine,” a prose-poem dedicated to the memory of the title character — born in Rooster, Arkansas, in 1925; singer on Beale Street in the 1940s; composer of the rocking “Lemme Get Up First” (which was covered by the Rolling Stones); and dead from drink in a Memphis boarding house in 1976. You never heard of Sweet Annie Divine? Musicologist Alan Lomax had. “She could have been one of the greats,” Lomax claimed, “if not for the hooch.”

Look for “Sweet Annie Divine” filed by Keillor under the section in Good Poems titled “Never Expected To Be There.” Nor, I’m guessing, did Corey Mesler ever expect to see his work alongside the work of the other poets Keillor includes under that heading: among them, Charles Bukowski, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke, and William Carlos Williams.

“The poem in the Keillor anthology is from a cockeyed Beale Street book I am working on,” Mesler said in an email. “But I’m surprised that out of all my poems he chose ‘Sweet Annie Divine.’ It seems to me to stick out in the book like a thumbprint on a painted canvas. I do write in the style that goes by many names — prose poems, flash fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts. Most aren’t as freakish and funky as that one, though.”

“Freakish” and “funky” you would not use to describe “Before the Great Troubling,” the poem that gives title to (and closes) Mesler’s collection of nearly a hundred poems, the earliest, “Sortilege,” written, Mesler said, “way back.” (He was in his 20s.)

Most of these poems are previously unpublished, but readers will recognize Mesler’s subject matter: his wife and children; former girlfriends; literary lights (the Beats; Thomas Pynchon); rock-and-roll royalty (John Lennon); his late father; small moments with his daughter Chloe; larger matters of life and death; and the practice of writing itself. Included too: a Zen look at the perfect jump shot, plus a patient’s lament in “Bell’s Palsy 1” and last, not least: “Before the Great Troubling.”

“That poem is about agoraphobia,” Mesler said, a condition he has wrestled with for years. “But I feel like it could speak for anything that bifurcates your life into ‘before’ and ‘after.’ I wrote it as a way of bridging my past and present. I’ve made some peace with a few things.”

And it shows.

“I hope the collection has a gentle ‘arc’ to it,” Mesler said. “One that travels from ‘Opening’ [which opens the book] to optimism” — optimism being welcome territory among Mesler’s signature concerns. And perhaps that’s partially a function of his taking a less active role in the daily running of Burke’s:

“That was a kind, good idea of my wife’s. I could expound on this at length, but maybe that will be my next book.”

After, that is, Corey Mesler’s short story collection appears this summer. After those two chapbooks, which may or may not appear sooner. And after that self-described cockeyed book on Beale.

Signature concerns: Twenty years ago, Burke’s Book Store hosted a signing for a little-known author who became a big-name author when his second novel hit the very big-time. The author was John Grisham. The novel was The Firm. And since then, Grisham has been good about providing Burke’s with autographed copies of his works.

To celebrate that signing from two decades ago, the store is running a special promotion during the month of May: Pre-order one or more autographed copies of Grisham’s latest title for young adults, Theodore Boone: The Abduction (due out in early June from Dutton), and you’ll get a 20 percent discount on Grisham’s forthcoming adult thriller. That book, so far untitled, is scheduled to be published in November. Also on tap for May at Burke’s: a drawing at the store for additional autographed Grisham memorabilia.

To pre-order signed copies of Theodore Boone: The Abduction (sorry, signature only; no inscription), go to burkesbooks.com or call the store at 278-7484 before May 31st.

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Gone?

Nope. Davis-Kidd isn’t gone. The store is out of the hands of liquidators, and a bankruptcy court judge approved a deal that grants ownership of the store to Neil Van Uum, who’d headed Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Davis-Kidd’s former parent company. Thanks to Van Uum, Laurelwood Shopping Center president and owner Tom Prewitt, the staff at Davis-Kidd, and Memphis’ book-buying community, Davis-Kidd is back from the brink and intends to stay back: The store has signed a 10-year lease with Laurelwood, with plans for a major remodeling in the fall.

But Gone, yes: It’s Nell Dickerson’s photographs documenting what remains of pre-Civil War buildings in the Mid-South. (Pictured: Parlor, circa 1852, Hinds County, Miss.) It’s a beautiful book brought to you by BelleBooks, a publisher (with major Memphis ties) dedicated to Southern authors, and who could be more Southern than Shelby Foote? Foote is not only Dickerson’s cousin by marriage, his story “Pillar of Fire” (drawn from his novel Jordan County) runs alongside Dickerson’s images in the pages of Gone. Be at Davis-Kidd on Saturday to have Dickerson sign her book. Be at Davis-Kidd to celebrate its new, truly independent book-store status.

And don’t forget Burke’s. It’s Memphis’ oldest independent book store, and it’s hosting Kyran Pittman, who will be signing Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life (Riverhead Books). A blogger and contributing writer at Good Housekeeping, Pittman lives in suburban Little Rock with her husband and sons, which is a far cry from her unconventional upbringing on the island of Newfoundland. Pittman’s book: a very winning look at the trials and joys of marriage and motherhood — and foreclosure. Meet the author when you’re out and about at Thursday night’s Cooper-Young Night Out.

Nell Dickerson presenting and signing “Gone,” Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Saturday, May 7th, 1 p.m.; Kyran Pittman reading from and signing “Planting Dandelions,” Burke’s Book Store, Thursday, May 5th, 5:30 p.m.

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Sign In, Please

“The real definition of insanity is folding a fitted sheet … and expecting it to result in anything other than a migraine and a huge turban.”

So writes Memphian turned San Franciscan Lisa Quinn in her new book, Life’s Too Short To Fold Fitted Sheets. Quinn will be signing and discussing her useful (and light-hearted) look at curing domestic divadom on Thursday at Davis-Kidd.

At D-K the next day: Say hello to Memphians Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, the couple whose story you read of and saw in the book and film The Blind Side. The title of their own book is In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving, and this week, they’re getting a ton of national media attention. For some local attention, meet the couple at their only Memphis booksigning.

This summer’s already been crazy hot. Doesn’t Ice Cold sound good right about now? That’s the title of the latest from crime novelist Tess Gerritsen, who will be at Davis-Kidd to sign it on Tuesday. She’ll be discussing the book too at a taping of Book Talk at the Central Library earlier on Tuesday. You’re invited.

And you’re advised to take note of the modern-day ghost story Her Fearful Symmetry, authored by Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote an earlier best-seller, The Time Traveler’s Wife. Her Fearful Symmetry was critically acclaimed when the hardback appeared last fall. Be on hand when Niffenegger reads from and signs the new paperback edition at Burke’s Book Store on Tuesday. If you make it snappy, you can make it to both Gerritsen’s and Niffenegger’s early-evening signings on Tuesday. That laundry you thought needed folding? Forget the fitted sheets. Life’s too short. Lisa Quinn says so.

At Davis-Kidd Booksellers (683-9801): Lisa Quinn, Thursday, July 15th, 6 p.m.; Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, Friday, July 16th, 6 p.m.; Tess Gerritsen, Tuesday, July 20th, 6 p.m.

At the WYPL Studios inside the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library: Tess Gerritsen on “Book Talk,” 3:30 p.m. (seating limited; for more information, call 415-2752).

At Burke’s Book Store (278-7484): Audrey Niffenegger, Tuesday, July 20th, 5:30 p.m.

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Get Surreal at Burke’s

The press release reads: “This inaugural issue contains dream stories, horror stories, monster stories, insanity, magical realism, the distorted, the peculiar, the impossible, the irrational.”

Must be the South, the surreal South, we’re talking about and as envisioned by a bunch of contributors in an anthology of short fiction and poetry called Surreal South (Press 53, $19.95).

And a good bunch they are: Robert Olen Butler, William Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Offutt, George Singleton, and Daniel Woodrell. Writers Laura Benedict (author of the new novel Isabella Moon) and Pinckney Benedict too.

The Benedicts are the editors of the anthology, and they’ll be signing (and reading from) Surreal South at Burke’s Book Store (936 S. Cooper) on Saturday, November 10th, from 2 to 4 p.m. Contributors (and husband and wife) Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly will be on hand as well to read from their work, beginning at 3.

For more information, call Burke’s at 278-7484.

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Outreach

Poetry and prose. Fiction and nonfiction. If you’re interested in the state of the art of writing and if you’re into meeting with and hearing from some authors of note, beginning this week and continuing into November, you’ve got some good pickings. All of them are thanks to the creative-writing department at the University of Memphis, and all of them are free and open to the public.

For starters, what was once River City is now The Pinch, a semiannual literary journal sponsored by the U of M. In its pages, you’ll find fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography, and the fall 2007 issue is ready. To celebrate, Burke’s Book Store is hosting a release party on Saturday, October 13th, from 6 to 8 p.m. The event promises readings by visiting authors (as of this writing, Claudia Grinnell and Margaret McMullen, among others), and this issue of The Pinch includes pieces by Lee Gutkind and Dinty Moore, plus an interview with poet Linda Gregerson.

September will also see the announcement of the winners in the journal’s national contest (sponsored by the Hohenberg Foundation) for poetry and fiction. Make that “international” contest. According to assistant managing editor of The Pinch (and MFA student) Matt Pertl, this year’s contest received some 300 submissions worldwide, and that includes authors from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Great Britain, Australia, Columbia, Bolivia, and Japan. Judges Pam Houston (in the short-story category) and Linda Gregerson (in the poetry category) had some reading to do. You’ll have some reading too when The Pinch hits bookstores here and nationwide. Just look for the artful cover by U of M graphic designer Gary Golightly.

For more information on The Pinch, go to http://cas.memphis.edu/english/pinch/home/home.htm.

Care to hear from memoirist Joyce Maynard, novelist Charles Baxter, and poet C.K. Williams? They’re all about to be in town as part of the U of M’s River City Writers Series, now in its 30th year.

Maynard will be reading on October 24th at the Holiday Inn University on Central. Baxter (his The Feast of Love just hit movie theaters, starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear) will be reading at the Galloway Mansion in Midtown on October 29th. And the Pink Palace will be the setting for a reading by Williams on November 15th. What, no classroom time? Yes, classroom time, when the authors follow up their readings and signings with interviews inside Patterson Hall on the U of M campus.

But according to Rebecca Skloot, who arrived at the U of M this semester to teach creative nonfiction, the idea this year is to get the visiting authors out of class and into the community. “Arts-friendly” venues is what Skloot calls them, and they’re designed to make the writers series more inviting, more accessible — to turn them into a public event.

“When you’re at a reading,” Skloot says, “you want to be in a beautiful place. You want to ‘feel’ the art. You want to have the opportunity to mingle, talk.” She means the readings to be fun.

For more information on this fall’s River City Writers Series, go to http://cas.memphis.edu/english/rcw/season.htm.

What’s more? More poetry — at the very accessible P&H Café when former U of M students read from their work: Burke’s Book Store owner and Flyer contributor Corey Mesler and former Flyer staff member and teacher at the Memphis College of Art Mary Molinary. Onetime professor of English at the U of M and Commercial Appeal columnist Frederic Koeppel will also be reading. So too Matt Cook, a poet from Milwaukee who professes to write poetry for “people who hate poetry.” The reading at the P&H (1532 Madison) is on Thursday, October 11th, at 7 p.m.

Can’t make it to any or all of the above? Doesn’t mean you’re not on the lookout for new writers. See then: Best New American Voices 2008, a collection of short stories just published by Harcourt and drawn from university writing departments, workshops, and conferences. Nationally recognized novelist and short-story writer Richard Bausch is this year’s editor. That’s the same Richard Bausch who teaches creative writing at the — that’s right — University of Memphis.