The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA)–Mississippi Region is excited to host Iris Lutz, President of JASNA, the weekend of September 6-8th. The Mississippi Region of JASNA is less than two years old, but has already been recognized by the national organization for its quick buildup of membership (over 30 members across the state), interesting events (academic classes, tea parties, films and discussions), scholarship (articles by members in JASNA’s prestigious journal Persuasions), and unique Jane Austen-inspired products (t-shirts, notecards, bookmarks, earrings, and Christmas ornaments). Ms. Lutz ‘s visit is a wonderful recognition of our new region.
Ms. Lutz will be making her keynote presentation in the Ellen Douglas Meeting Room at the Eudora Welty Library on Sunday afternoon. Ms. Lutz’s powerpoint presentation is entitled “Houses in Jane Austen’s Life and Fiction.” This illustrated talk on houses in Jane Austen’s real and imagined worlds will shed light on many of the homes and estates that figured in her life and novels. The visual tour will feature houses Austen lived in and visited while in Chawton, Bath, Winchester, and Kent. Friends of the Library will help host and provide hospitality for the event.
Ms. Lutz’s program is free and open to the public. Please join JASNA-Mississippi and Friends of the Library on Sunday, September 7th, at 2:30 at the Eudora Welty Library for this exciting event.
John Evans was born in Jackson on Aug. 13, 1950, at the old Baptist Hospital.
He grew up here, has owned a business here — Lemuria Books — for 39 years and raised a family here.
“Only time I left was to go to college at Ole Miss,” Evans says, and then laughs. “I really haven’t been much of anywhere except Jackson and Oxford.”
That last statement is a slight stretch, of course. But Evans’ point is clear: He loves Jackson. His most precious childhood memories are sewn with its thread. It bothers him that the city often gets a bad rap, even if it’s often deserved.
“It’s a matter of what you focus on,” he says. “There are so many great, positive, beautiful things about Jackson that so many people seem to either take for granted or simply forget exist.”
He is attempting to awaken the grown-ups and educate the youngsters with a new coffee table photograph book, “Jackson.” It was published by Evans and Lemuria Books. It was Evans’ brainchild, literally a second job for the past two years. And now it is his mission to get the book into as many hands as possible. He would like to recoup his printing expenses, and he won’t weep if it makes a little money. But he says success will be measured by how many people give his book — and his hometown — an open-minded chance.
“I don’t think people can flip through the pages, really look closely at the wonderful things Jackson has to offer, and then tell me that this city doesn’t have potential,” he says. “That’s our brand for the book — ‘Let’s talk Jackson.’ Let’s talk about what’s good, what’s bad, what’s possible. And let’s really talk, honestly, about what Jackson can be. Because I think the possibilities are endless.”
He isn’t blind to Jackson’s problems.
“We’ve been hit with issues like a pie in the face,” he says. “Crime is bad. The streets are bad. The water problem is bad and has caused a tremendous waste in tax dollars, according to what I read in The Clarion-Ledger this week. There has been a lack of leadership, a lack of understanding the importance of small businesses. I totally acknowledge all that. I’ve lived it.
“But I still see the beauty.”
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Jackson wasn’t Mayberry when Evans was a child, but there were similarities.
His parents had rural backgrounds. His dad, John, grew up in Lake, and his mom, Dot, was raised in the tiny Scott County community of Forkville.
Evans first lived with his parents in a house across the street from what is now Belhaven University. They soon moved to a house on Avondale Drive, in the Fondren area. He would ride his bicycle to Duling Elementary, and then after school across the parking lot to Brent’s, where he would order fries and “those great malted milkshakes made the old-fashioned way.”
Evans’ world was shaken at age 12, in November 1962, when his dad died of a heart attack while mowing the yard.
His mother went to work as the Hinds County home economist. He had to get used to an empty house when he arrived after school.
“But everybody around us in the neighborhood were our friends,” he says, “so it wasn’t like I had no one to go to if I needed anything. And I was over at my friends’ houses a lot.
“So many of the friends I had back then are still among my best friends today.”
One of them, Pat Hall, has worked at Lemuria on and off for the past 35 years. She grew up one street over from Evans.
“My medical doctor was a member of my 10-year-old baseball team,” Evans says. “I’ve had a pretty good life, being able to run a bookstore in my hometown and staying in close touch with so many of the people I grew up with.”
All of those things, from the milkshakes at Brent’s to playing on the same youth baseball fields on Lakeland as his son did 28 years later, keep Evans from giving up on Jackson. It motivates him to keep others from giving up, too.
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The “Jackson” photos were taken by Ken Murphy, who has done other notable photographic work in Mississippi.
His pictures of the city are stunning. More than once, I had to do a double take. “Is that really in Jackson?” I would ask myself. And then read, yes, there is a place someone can sit and fish and be alone with nature. Crane Creek, in Evans’ old neighborhood.
Among Evans’ favorite photos: bull riding at the Mississippi Black Rodeo “because of the expressions on people’s faces”; the Cherokee restaurant; Eudora Welty’s home; and a lucky shot of former Gov. William Winter standing in front of his home. “He just happened to walk out as Ken was shooting pictures,” Evans explains. “Ken asked him if he would mind being photographed, and he said he would consider it an honor. Sort of meant to be.”
After looking at the collection of photos, I can see at least part of what Evans sees.
But there is something else to remember: While Jackson is home to 175,000, this is the capital city, the only one Mississippians have. It should matter to us all, whether you’re in Corinth or Clarksdale, Oxford or Starkville, Macon or Mendenhall, Laurel or Leakesville, Petal or Pascagoula.
Whether or not you like it, Jackson will always be the face of our state in many ways. Give it a chance.
Contact Billy Watkins at (769) 257-3079 or bwatkins@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @BillyWatkins11 on Twitter.
Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com.
Jim PathFinder Ewing has written six books, published in English, French, German, Russian and Japanese. His latest is “Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating” (Findhorn Press, 2012). His next book — about which he is mysteriously silent — is scheduled to be released in Spring, 2015. Find him on Facebook, join him on Twitter @EdiblePrayers, or see his website,www.blueskywaters.com
Looking at the photo of The Clarion-Ledger building, there’s no clue that once it had a feisty rival called the Jackson Daily News, housed in a adjacent portion of that same building. I tell people I worked for the C-L for 32 years; but in fact, the first 10 years were with the JDN, until the papers merged in 1989. Jimmy Ward hired me. Both papers were then owned by the Hederman family. JDN folk bitterly fought to scoop the C-L. We felt like stepchildren, as we were paid less, and had a smaller staff.
We were in the old YMCA building, which is now a C-L parking lot. Gannett tore down the building. The Hedermans apparently didn’t like or trust the JDN building either. The C-L was built on a heavy concrete structure — I’m told, thinking that one day they might build upwards, as a skyscraper. The JDN building was wooden and the floors creaked when anybody walked on them. The Hedermans must have thought it was a firetrap because there were only two doors linking the second floor and both had automatic shields designed to slam shut and seal the C-L building in case of fire. The JDN portion of the building was left to its own fate.
I used to stare at those steel doors while the JDN newsroom puffed on cigarettes, reporters carelessly flipping lit butts in the direction of waste baskets overflowing with wadded up rolls of paper from the AP machine chattering nearby. Sometimes, those rolls did smolder a bit. Nobody had heard of secondhand smoke. When I started working as an editor on the JDN city desk, they gave me a key to the newsroom. When the last Jackson Daily News rolled off the press, there were only three of us editors left.
I still have that key – to a door that no longer exists.
Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com.
We always felt that the house chose us as much as we chose it. Carolyn and I had been to a couple of JoAnne’s parties, the last one being the celebration of the movie release of My Dog Skip after Willie died. I was always struck with how real their home felt, surrounded by genuine laughter, someone playing the piano, curiosities and ephemera, and of course, a library’s worth of books.
When JoAnne decided that the house was too big for her to keep up, I believe that she not only wanted to find someone to buy the house, but also to honor it. Which brings up an interesting challenge: how do you make a home yours, while honoring those who came before you?
We’ve tried to do both – and I think that Willie would be happy to see that the cats from the neighborhood still hang out in the crawl space. Curious literary fans still drive by slowly. There are dozens of assorted balls and sports gear scattered about the house, garage, and yard. In fact, our son John keeps a collection of baseballs in the same small closet where Willie kept his. And the books, my gosh, the books. They are everywhere.
We have Willie’s highway map of Yazoo County framed upstairs and a photo downstairs of Willie taken by his son, David Rae. And every now and then, we will find some odd treasure that Willie had hidden or misplaced. I think Willie would like the fact that our neighbors, Governor Winter and Dick Molpus, still tell Willie stories every time we see them. Dick told me recently that Willie would walk down to his house every Christmas to say hello as part of his “once-a-year exercise.”
But I don’t think Willie would want his former home to be a shrine. Or something too precious. I think he would appreciate that the paint is peeling here and there and there’s a patch where we just can’t get grass to grow. I think he’d be happy to see it alive, with the same kind of love and laughter that you felt and heard when he lived there.
Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com.
My favorite books are ones that speak to my heart and head, ones that make me think but also affect my emotions. The Story of Land and Sea is one of these books. With lucid prose, historical and cultural accuracy, and a set of complex yet relatable characters, this debut novel from Jackson native Katy Simpson Smith has been one of the best I’ve read this year.
The novel’s plot follows three generations—John and Helen, their daughter Tabitha, and Helen’s father Asa—as their lives twine and separate and twine together again. Set in coastal North Carolina soon after the revolutionary war, the story’s themes of struggle and discovery mirror our then-fledgling nation’s obstacles of defining itself as something other than a former colony. But it’s more than just a parable for our country: the characters are so compelling and relatable, even for readers seated comfortably nearly four centuries later. John, the center of most of the plots, is a former pirate who marries Helen, daughter of the wealthy landowner Asa. Rather than falling into the trappings of cliché, Smith keeps the plot believable by focusing on the characters’ personalities, all of whom are likable, relatable, yet capable of much unsavoriness. (I’m being vague on purpose. If you want to know what happens, you’ll need to come buy a copy).
The cultural and historical accuracy of this story is another place my affinity rests. Smith has a PhD in history from UNC, and she applies her knowledge of early America without turning the novel into a textbook. The sentences themselves flow so easily, I found myself lost in the beauty of the writing several times. Here’s an example, focusing on the wedding of John and Helen:
The marriage takes place in the summer, among the heaved-up roots of the live oak, the lone tree that curves over the front lawn, bend and contorted to the shapes the easterly wind made. Moll [a slave] fidgets in a yellow linen dress with two petticoats and holds a spray of goldenrod that she pulled from the back garden; no one else had thought to.
With writing this good, it makes sense that one of the central images in the book is water. Like water, this story, its characters, and its words are fluid and powerful.
Join us tonight at 5:00 as Katy kicks off her national book tour here at Lemuria with a reading and signing for The Story of Land and Sea!
accuracy of this story is another place my affinity rests. Smith has a PhD in history from UNC, and she applies her knowledge of early America without turning the novel into a textbook. The sentences themselves flow so easily, I found myself lost in the beauty of the writing several times. Here’s an example, focusing on the wedding of John and Helen: