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Last week, 200-plus authors were in town for the Southern Festival of Books. This week, the number of visiting writers is down to six, but what a list.

Native Memphian Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and now Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Tuesday. Read what Sides has to say on page 40 of this week’s Flyer. Hear what Mitch Albom (Tuesdays With Morrie) has to say when Albom reads from and signs his latest, a novel, For One More Day, at the Church of the Holy Communion on Wednesday, October 25th, at 11:15 a.m.

One more day? Try 20 years — of marriage. Steve Doocy, co-host of Fox & Friends on the Fox News Network, has tried it, and he’s happy to tell you about it in The Mr. & Mrs. Happy Handbook: Everything I Know About Love and Marriage. Doocy will be at Davis-Kidd on Friday at 6 p.m.

And speaking of Fox, “Sister” Jane Arnold may be master of the foxhunt, but she’s on the trail of murder and mayhem (again) in Rita Mae Brown’s The Hounds and the Fury, which Brown will be signing at Davis-Kidd on Monday at 6 p.m.

Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain was a surprise bestseller and National Book Award winner. Ten years later, he’s again in the 19th-century South with Thirteen Moons. Frazier will be signing at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday at 7 p.m., which shouldn’t prevent you, earlier the same night, from meeting Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and now The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. The topic is the gridiron, but the focus is left tackle (and Memphian) Michael Oher, who plays for Ole Miss. You may have recently read some of this story in The New York Times Magazine. Now read the whole story in The Blind Side. Lewis will be at Davis-Kidd on Thursday at 6 p.m.

For more information, visit Davis-Kidd Booksellers’ Web site at www.daviskidd.com and the Burke’s Book Store site at www.burkesbooks.com.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

To the Moon!

When you talk to David Magee about the MoonPie, he constantly uses phrases like “Well, the funny thing about MoonPies is” and “That’s the thing about MoonPies!” And before long, he’s convinced you that there really are a lot of funny and interesting things about the South’s favorite snack. So many, in fact, that he wrote a book about it.

For example, did you know that MoonPies have been around for 75 years and are still made by a family-owned bakery in Chattanooga? Or that the Chattanooga Bakery makes nothing else? Or that they make one million MoonPies every day and are thought to be the world’s largest manufacturer of marshmallow?

All this, plus history, business philosophy, and personal reflection can be found in MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack, which just hit stores. Magee will be signing copies at the Southern Festival of Books in Memphis on Saturday, October 14th.

How two cookies and some marshmallow went from portable miner’s snack to Southern icon is a story of perseverance, luck, economics, loyalty, and a remarkably simple business plan.

“The craziest thing about MoonPies,” Magee says, “is that they’ve never done any advertising. It’s a totally customer-driven demand.”

In fact, it all started with a customer’s demand. Back in 1917, a bakery rep named Earl Mitchell was in the mining area of eastern Kentucky, unable to get his products placed in stores. So he went to the miners and posed a question: “What do y’all want?” They said they wanted something filling and portable. “How big?” A miner framed the moon with his hands and said, “This big!” Back at the plant, Mitchell noticed workers dipping graham crackers in marshmallow, then laying them out in the sun to dry. He covered them in chocolate, and a sweet-toothed monster was born.

The MoonPie’s growth, as well as its famous and completely accidental marriage with RC Cola, resulted from filling a physical and economic need: Throughout the rural South, both items were the biggest, sweetest thing you could get for a nickel. (The two companies have never worked together on this idea, Magee says.) Over the years, Chattanooga Bakery stopped making anything else, and they still only make three flavors of MoonPie: vanilla, chocolate, and banana, with the occasional seasonal treat like orange for Halloween.

“The thing about MoonPies is they are still owned by the same family, which is incredibly rare,” Magee says. “Their CEO tells me he gets dozens of calls a month from people wanting to buy the company. They don’t sell because they’re making a living off of it and because this snack, as we know it, that so many people love, would be gone if it gets bought up by some big conglomerate. Their philosophy is to underpromote and overdeliver. All they’ve focused on is making it and getting it on the shelves.”

There have been challenges along the way, one of which resulted from what may be the perfect Southern business story. It seems that Sam Walton was fond of attending Wal-Mart grand openings, and one day in the 1980s he was at a store in Alabama. He asked an employee what problems they were faced with, and she said, “We can’t get MoonPies.” This was on a Friday afternoon. Sam called the bakery, and Sunday morning a rep was on his way to Bentonville with a selection of MoonPies. By Monday, the “mini” MoonPie was a “Sam’s Choice” at the world’s largest retailer, with Sam himself going to stores to make sure the displays were done right.

But the story doesn’t end there. Chattanooga Bakery had made the mini MoonPie just for Sam, and they didn’t have the machinery to handle the new item. They’ve only got one assembly line, and all their machines are custom-built; they are, after all, the only people in the world making the things. So when that line goes down, troubles arise. But they figured it out, and the mini is now a surging item at big discount stores.

Another problem was solved right here in Memphis. For years, the MoonPie was stuck at that nickel price, and when vending machines came along in the 1960s, the company needed to take advantage to fetch a higher price. Again, the answer was simple, and it came from a Memphis rep: Make it a double-decker! Again, the machines had to be retooled, and again, the MoonPie prevailed.

To date, the company has sold four billion MoonPies, most of them in what Magee calls “the MoonPie Belt”: Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. It’s positioned, Magee says, as a between-meals, “mom-friendly” snack.

“I think it’s a combination of memory — like people getting their first MoonPie from a grandparent and getting that nostalgic, country-store feeling — and that it’s filling and tasty,” Magee says. “They’re not makin’ a million a day if it doesn’t taste good.”

You can read an excerpt from MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack on MemphisFlyer.com.

Booksigning by David Magee

9 a.m., Saturday, October 14th

Southern Festival of Books

Memphis Cook Convention Center

portlandpaul@mac.com

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News News Feature

October Fest

In 2004, Humanities Tennessee made its move. It took the Southern Festival of Books from Nashville, where the event had been held annually, to Memphis, and despite some soggy weather, the festival made a major splash — major enough for Humanities Tennessee, which organizes the event, to make Memphis the site of the festival every other year. (Major enough too for the 2004 festival to contribute over $600,000 in state and local taxes and for planners this year to anticipate more than 20,000 visitors.)

The 18th annual Southern Festival of Books is Friday-Sunday, October 13th-15th, and it’s once more celebrating the written word in downtown Memphis at the Cook Convention Center and on the Main Street Mall — celebrating big time, inside and out, with over 200 national, regional, and local authors who will be reading from their works, participating in panel discussions, and meeting one-on-one with readers at booksignings.

Booksellers and publishers will be among the 70 exhibitors. Outdoor stages will be the setting for songwriters and musicians, poets and playwrights. And a children’s stage will include a puppet show, a magic show, and appearances by favorites such as Winnie the Pooh, Curious George, and Lilly (of purple plastic purse fame). See the festival’s full program in this week’s Memphis Flyer (which is helping sponsor the event), but see here: All events are free and open to the public, rain or shine.

“I don’t even look at the weather,” says Serenity Gerbman, director of literature and language programs for Humanities Tennessee. “My boss keeps track of it. I pretend like it’s going to be fine, because there’s nothing I can do about it.”

What she can do is praise Memphis for its volunteer support and financial support: “Both have been strong,” Gerbman reports. “Smooth” is how she describes this year’s planning of the festival; “pleased” is how she describes the staff at Humanities Tennessee, who having been working closely with sponsors AutoZone, Archer Malmo advertising, the Assisi Foundation, Davis-Kidd Booksellers, the Community Foundation, and Mid South Reads.

But in case you don’t know, what is Humanities Tennessee?

“We’re a private, nonprofit organization, and it’s important to note that,” Gerbman says. “People do sometimes get confused and think we’re a state agency like the Tennessee Arts Commission, but we’re not. We get no funding from the state at all. We’re most closely associated with the National Endowment for the Humanities, through whom we get the bulk of our funding every year.

“In addition to the Southern Festival of Books, we do the Tennessee Young Writers Workshop, a weeklong residential writing program for high school students. And we’re involved in the Museum on Main Street program, in conjunction with the Smithsonian, which takes traveling exhibits, based on a particular area, to rural communities throughout the state.”

The idea to alternate the Southern Festival of Books between Nashville and Memphis was one that had been “floating around.” In fact, according to Gerbman, “a National Endowment for the Humanities evaluation years ago recommended we think about it. When Nashville wasn’t available in 2004 because of construction at the festival’s downtown site, it was a good time to explore the move to Memphis. We’re a statewide organization — with a statewide mission and a statewide focus. We felt our constituents would be better served if we took the festival — Humanities Tennessee’s largest annual event — to another area.”

Working to bring writers of national repute to the area is another matter, and this year the festival delivers with a wide range: Andrei Codrescu, John Hope Franklin, Julia Glass, J.A. Jance, Edward Jones, Garrison Keillor, Nicholas Lemann, and Barry Lopez. (In addition to all-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings.)

On the Southern literary front, count on Howard Bahr, Robert Owen Butler, Elizabeth Dewberry, William Gay, Kaye Gibbons, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith.

Graeme Base, Memphian Alice Faye Duncan, Laura Numeroff, Deborah Wiles, and Paul Zelinsky are among this year’s authors or illustrators of children’s books.

And on the local front, fiction and nonfiction, Memphians or former Memphians, look for Richard Bausch, Marshall Bosworth, Erik Calonius, Tom Carlson, Lisa C. Hickman, Cary Holladay, Alan Lightman, Reginald Martin, Phyllis Tickle, James Perry Walker, and Treasure Williams. (And look to Oxford too: John T. Edge, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, and David Galef.)

No wonder Serenity Gerbman calls the literary scene in Memphis a “vibrant” one. The authors above testify to it. The 18th annual Southern Festival of Books is coming to prove it.

HumanitiesTennessee.org

Southern Festival of Books

Cook Convention Center and Main Street Mall

Friday-Sunday, October 13th-15th

Free and open to the public

gill@memphisflyer.com