If you’ve been to Lemuria within the last couple of months, then you know we’ve been developing our graphic novels section. Unlike gardening or history, this section doesn’t really have an someone to oversee it; it kind of belongs to all of us who enjoy reading this type of book. All of us take turns cleaning it, rifling through it when new books come in, and staring at it fondly from the front desk.

The newest graphic novel worth mentioning is Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor. IT’S AMAZING. I’ve already decided it’s the best book of the year. And I’m sure I won’t be the only one. Andre, Kelly, and Hannah have already purchased their copies. (You should, as well.)

Ugh, this book is just so good. As in, stop what you’re doing, lie there, and think about what you’ve just read.

I tried to write this blog right after finishing the book, but couldn’t. This book makes you feel things, guys. My heart hurts, but in a good way (if that makes sense). Now, all of you read this book so I can have someone to talk to.

Written by Elizabeth 

Keeping a diary is hard. I’ve always been so jealous of people who carry around battered little books, jotting down thoughts and making themselves permanent in the world. In college, I had a friend who journaled in paper thin moleskines, burning through each of them in less than a month. She would decorate the simple brown covers with photographs, her own writing, pieces of her experiences from the weeks before. Instead of seeming like a juvenile scrapbook, I felt like if her thoughts were spread out like a physical map- with little mountains of fear and rivers of contentment.

To be able to chronicle my life in such a way that I leave an honest, unflinching imprint of myself behind is something I fear I’ll never be able to do. It’s something, in fact, that some people would rather never do. Zadie Smith, author of NW, wrote in a recent post for Rookie Mag that journaling was something she could never get the hang of, nor did she want to. She wrote, “I was never able to block from my mind a possible audience, and this ruined it for me”.

Flannery O’Connor seemed extremely self-aware when writing in her prayer journal, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her handwritten notebooks seem meticulously organized, with very few spelling mistakes or crossed-out sentences. I can’t help but wonder if she transcribed these journals from another, messier book. In the pages, she implores, “Please help me dear God to be a good writer”, and it feels like her journal is in fact the preparation for her future as a well-known artist. An insurance policy, as it were, something that needed to be well-done; because once she was famous, people would find it, and they wouldn’t be able to keep from reading its pages.

I’ve got to say, I have never once journaled without the thought of someone reading it after I’m gone. In high school, I was drowning in ALL THE FEELINGS, yet instead of keeping a journal, I wrote everything, all the excruciating details of my DEEPLY FELT FEELINGS in a blog. A blog, people. The antithisis of a secret diary. Maybe it says something about how self-absorbed my generation is, but maybe for some people, an audience is somehow necessary. Is it possible for a journal to be just as truthful and cathartic if the author knows that someone else will read it? And because I never kept a secret diary, I don’t have the answer.

There are several talented people, thankfully, who are up for the task of intimate, non-blog journaling. Sarah Manguso’s new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary chronicles her fear of forgetting, and her obsession with the passing of time. While not a diary itself, Ongoingness offers very poignant thoughts about the process of keeping a journal. Some around Manguso lauded her as committed and hard-working for keeping up with a diary, meticulously writing down every detail; while in reality, to her it sometimes felt like a vice. A diary wasn’t a way for her to unwind and contemplate the events of the day, it was a a place to write in a panicked, grasping gasps, never quite able to fit the realness of a day onto the pages.

“Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.”

Vice or laborious ball and chain? To each his own, I suppose, but it is clear in the abundance of published diaries that wrestling with the idea of how to document our short time on earth is nothing new. Guess it’s time for me to try a new format.

Written by Hannah

By Jim Ewing
Special to The Clarion-Ledger

Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story should be included in every workshop on How To Write.

Professors of English can point to its lyric prose that coils on itself like a snake. Political scientists and historians can find ample fodder for topics as diverse as the forces that brought the likes of Huey P. Long and Theo G. Bilbo to power.

Religious scholars and sociologists can refer to its accuracy in exploring the relationship between cultural conservatism and the moral implications of rock ’n’ roll. But readers are at once ensnared by the man Jerry Lee Lewis himself, whose music “made Elvis cry.”

As Bragg, a Southernor, well understands, we cannot fathom Lewis’s music until we have felt the lash and storm of his upbringing. Bragg traces Mississippi-Louisiana history from its violent, bitter beginnings of conquest, duel, slavery and song into the 20th century.

He paints the place with levees so tall “a man had to walk uphill to drown.” A cauldron of people, passions and violence, from Ferriday, La., to Natchez, Miss., to New Orleans, to Memphis, he lays out the landscape where Jerry Lee Lewis found form and substance, where gamblers and oil speculators, prostitutes and hoboes “came off the boxcars like fleas.”

Lewis’s rearing came amid the vast wealth of the few torn from the misery of the many dirt poor working people, great river floods, rampant political corruption, and The Great Depression’s soul-killing darkness — that spawned hungry children and heartbreak, whiskey, drugs and the devil eternally dancing in the shadows. Preachers and bootleggers sometimes were the same. They were his blood kin, as some of us admit are our own. They all knew they were sinners and The Killer seemed preordained to sing their songs.

Jerry Lee was born of the stuff of country legends, learning to croon at the knee of his father Elmo between his prison stints and sitting in a pew with his mother listening to the Pentecostals speaking in tongues.

Lewis credits a major influence Haney’s Big House, a black honky tonk in the Jim Crow South where white men feared to tread and “women toted straight razors in their underwear.”

“It’s where I got my juice,” Lewis told Bragg, giving his music its characteristic guts, grit and power.

Bragg details Lewis’s long march into greatness and despair: the honky tonks, women, pills, hit songs, fist fights, and scandal over marrying Myra, his 13-old-cousin — one of six marriages by the pioneer of rock ’n’ roll — some memories “like playing catch with broken glass.”

Along the way are music trivia gems, such as Lewis’s signature hit Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, supposedly written by a black man at a fish camp on Florida’s Lake Okeechobee while drunk and milking rattlesnakes.

Bragg’s genius is alternating laser observations about the man and his milieu with stunning word play wrapped in seemingly effortless but exhaustive research. Bragg proves himself to be a journalist’s journalist by turning painstaking reportage into art.

Bragg doesn’t just chronicle a man but a region, and leads us like a secular evangelist to reexamine our own songs and sins.

Of Lewis, Bragg reports: “He did some meanness, God knows he did. But the music — funny how it turned out — was the purest part.”

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating, and the forthcoming Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, Spring 2015. Jim is a regular contributor to the Lemuria blog. 

It has been a busy year for the indie bookstores in our state. Lisa Howorth published Flying Shoes, an honest, bittersweet novel about an unsolved murder finally getting the attention it deserved- showing her customers at Square Books she knows how to write as well as sell books. Our fearless leader John put together a brilliant book of photographs with the help of photographer Ken Murphy to showcase what people from Jackson needed a reminder of: there’s something beautiful in our capitol city. Jamie Kornegay of Turnrow Books is now a member of this small club. His first novel Soil has just been released and I am quickly digging my way to the bottom of it.

Jay Mize is a smart but obsessive man who sees the writing on the walls that an apocalypse is coming; he’s just not sure which one yet. A farm is the smart way to save his family from the coming crash of civilization- unless it drives them away first. When he finds a body on the land surrounding his home, his mistrust of society leads him to quietly dispose of it. Unfortunately for him, the local deputy is out cruising for women in his Mustang and chasing his estranged wife. He might even try to solve the case. Far from being the traditional who-dun-it, this is a novel with a very clear sense of place and people. The kind of place where a warning shot to a man on your property can lead to conversation just as easily as a “hello.”

They say write what you know, and Jamie Kornegay shows just how much he knows about the web that ties small towns together and the secrets they have buried in their back yards. Come see him this Thursday at 5 and get a signed copy of Soil to find out for yourself if you want to learn what he knows: we are all a product of the land from which we came.

Written by Daniel 

A lonely woman is a dangerous woman…A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.

We all know the story of the bored housewife, her illicit affairs, the crumbling middle class family, the fallen woman who’s carefully stacked lies are doomed to come loose around her. But Jill Alexander Essbaum, with one foot in the 20th century and the other firmly planted in the present, evokes Virginia Wolfe, Sylvia Plath, and Kate Chopin. Hausfrau, Essbaum’s fiction debut, is classically modernist in it’s philosophical pondering and deeply flawed characters.

Hausfrau is the entangled story of an expat housewife living in Switzerland with her husband and three, rudy Swiss children. To say she is unhappy would be inaccurate. Anna is passive. She is an agreer, a woman quick to say “yes” because a “no” would reveal too much of herself. A self she may no longer know.

“What’s the difference between passivity and neutrality?”

“Passivity is deference. To be passive is to relinquish your will. Neutrality is nonpartisan. The Swiss are neutral, not passive. We do not choose a side. We are scales in perfect balance.”

“Not choosing. Is that still a choice?”

The novel flits between the past, present, Anna’s psychotherapy sessions that tug on the finely wrought veil she has created to keep her secrets, and shadowy admissions of adultery and love.

Essbaum shows her deft writing by keeping all the lies in the air. Doktor Messerli, perceptive therapist that she is, points us in the direction of the truth. She is a plumb-line of honesty.

As Anna stumbles in and out of faithfulness, Hausfrau teeters on the edge, if not plummets, into the erotic. Faith (also faithfulness) and desire cross swords on the page. It is in the half-light of her lust that Anna is revealed. It is this same light that casts us all into focus; our sins betray us.

Hausfrau is a warning; a marker to measure drift–once a line has been crossed, the seal broken, to err is habit.

Reading Hausfrau, I was reminded of Anais Nin’s introduction to Little Birds. “The sexual life,” she writes, “is usually enveloped in many layers, for all of us–poets, writers, artists. It is a veiled woman, half-dreamed.”

Hausfrau releases March 24, 2015 from Random House.