Written by Lee Anne Bryan

There is so much that I love about Jackson—it would fill up a book, not one blog post.  So I will limit myself to the circle that I drive every day, from my house to my job and then back home again.

I am not ashamed to admit that Briarwood Liquor Store is high on this list.  Nathan and Lesley are AWESOME.

THANK YOU GOD FOR WHOLE FOODS!  Not going to lie, this was my missing puzzle piece.  Now that I can get fish and kale for lunch that I didn’t have to cook myself—my life is complete.

St. Andrew’s Lower School.  It has provided our kids with the best start they could possibly have.

Murrah High School.  My first “real” job out of college.  And today has some of the most dedicated English teachers I have ever seen working there.  Go Mustangs!

The Eudora Welty House and Garden, which is my office.  Lots of people talk about a “dream job.”  I actually have one.  I get to walk around in Eudora Welty’s house during the day, telling visitors about her books and her love of reading and her life in Jackson.  I get to show school groups and students what it actually means to EDIT writing—by using Eudora’s drafts of One Writer’s Beginnings with her cut-and-pin method of revision.   Occasionally, I get to take a famous author through the house and be a little star-struck.   But I have to say that my favorite thing about my job is community.   There is a “Welty community” in Jackson, which includes the Eudora Welty Foundation, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Millsaps College, the Belhaven neighborhood, Lemuria Bookstore, and a legion of fans, volunteers, supporters, and great readers.   I am surrounded every day by people who share my love of reading and education and who believe that books and discussion MATTER in the world.

I grew up in Dallas.  Or, as one of my high school friends refers to it, “the land of lipstick.”  And if Dallas had any kind of literary community at all, I never saw it.  It was in my first semester at Millsaps College that Dr. Lorne Fienberg sent us as a class to Lemuria bookstore.   And I fell in love.  (Literally.  I met my husband at Lemuria.  But that’s a blog for another day.)  Between Lemuria, being able to go out at night to C.S.’s in running shoes and cutoffs, the great friends I made at Millsaps, and the fabulous book club we formed as Murrah teachers (which still meets), I found that I was HOME.

And now, twenty plus years later, my family and my job make me happier than I ever thought I could be.

Thanks, Jackson.  You’ve given and continue to give me a great life.

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. Please join us in celebrating Jackson tonight at 5:00 at the Eudora Welty House and Garden. 

Written by Chase Wynn 

Thank God she didn’t have a Kindle.

She being Eudora Welty, I mean. Have you been to her house? If you’re a reader, you really should. Not just because she was a great writer—and not just in the way you’re imagining. The little white-haired lady who wrote about quaint things like weddings in the Delta and people who lived in post offices? She was so, so much more than that. Read “No Place for You, My Love” sometime, or “The Hitch-Hikers,” or “A Still Moment.” Read “The Burning.”

That’s not why you should visit the house. Come look at her books. She had a lot of them—between five and six thousand in the house when she passed on. They’re everywhere. On shelves, yes, but also stacked on the couches, the tables, the spare beds. I’m told she liked to keep a different book going in every room of the house, so that no matter where she sat down, she could just keep going.

The usual suspects are there—Faulkner, and Proust, and Woolf—but so many others, too. Things I didn’t expect. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. A Confederacy of Dunces. True Grit. And mysteries, mysteries, mysteries. A snobby reader our girl was not.

A man named Tim Parks wrote an article for The New York Review of Books that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, especially when I walk in the Welty house: “The conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago… [today] every moment of serious reading has to be fought for.” I don’t mean to sound snarky when I say, “Thank God she didn’t have a Kindle.” This isn’t some sort of anti-tech rant. Heck, you’re reading this on a blog, right? But in a time when serious reading is so hard to do, in a time when you really have to fight for it, it’s nice to walk through her Tudor arch doorway and into a place that feels like a monument not only to a great writer, but to a truly great reader.

It’s the collection of a real reader, too. Yeah, there are some beautiful, leather-bound volumes in there. Mostly, though, there are tattered paperbacks and creased, worn out spines. She read the hell out of those books. She loved them—you can tell.

Come check her out sometime.

The Eudora Welty House will be hosting Ken Murphy for a signing of Jackson: Photographs by Ken Murphy Monday, August 11th @ 5 p.m. The book is also available for purchase at Lemuria (800-366-7619, or online at lemuriabooks.com)

Billy Neville opened “The Rogue” when I was in high school at Murrah. From the first day, Billy’s store was the coolest in Jackson.

Billy’s influence on the youth of Jackson at that time was remarkable. He had the “it” and his customers wanted “it” too. Billy’s style was interactive and engaging. The Rogue quickly grew into the 2nd floor space in the Capri building. Upstairs, he had a dartboard where us guys would go after school and toss darts in the retail store! Billy was ahead of his time, a marketer of fun with style. I even think I won the Rogue in a dart toss tournament! The feeling one had when leaving his groundbreaking store was that everyone was a winner, just for having the Rogue experience.

Billy’s Rogue business boomed and grew and grew and grew. The new Rogue overlooking the new interstate was the result, becoming truly a Jackson, MS institution.
A few years later, retailing became my occupation when I opened the bookstore. First Billy Neveille and then Bernie Weis, of Highland Village’s Maison Weis, became my duel mentors. From these two gentlemen, both clothiers, I learned how to market and think about retailing as an occupation. Their influence on me was powerful. This sounds unusual, since they were so interwoven in the culture of style and presentation of the time and Lemuria was a product of the counter-culture of the time. I believe when you get down to it, retailing is just retailing. It’s about being on the front lines, you are who you are and the customer sees this realness, no matter what.

Gosh, we all know retailing is hard and grueling, a pioneering of sorts. However, this type of work offers the ability for you to be creative, productive, helpful and can be rewarding while living on the front lines of life. Anybody anytime can make a request and your ability to prospect and answer with service is your reward. Customer service in actualization determines success or failure. This is a continuous process of daily helping, sharing, and reaping rewards.

Billy Neville’s influence on a generation or two of would-be be clothiers all over Mississippi is unprecedented, and his style has influenced retailers of all sorts. He led us with his spirit of sharing, and is a living example of Paul Hawkins’ “Growing Your Business” concept, which was the ‘80’s-now evolved into the modern terms of conscious business/capitalism. Billy’s spirit helped me formulate my concept of Lemuria. Thank you Billy for all the years of friendship and leadership, you have been invaluable to generations of Jacksonians, while making us look good in the process.
The Rogue is still open and thriving, thanks to Luke Abney, who carries Billy’s torch with his own spirit of small business in our city.

Written by John

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619, visit us online at lemuriabooks.com, or drop by the iconic Rogue to pick up a signed copy! Join us today from 1:00 to 3:00 at The Rogue for a celebration of Jackson.

Written by Malcolm White

By the time I moved to Jackson in the spring of 1979, just in time for the Easter Flood, I had already lived in Washington D.C., Los Gatos, California and New Orleans.  I committed to a one year contract for a job offer I simply could not refuse.  My plan was to get a good year’s experience and sock some money away before heading back to NOLA where a job offer to return to my old restaurant team and my idea of southern, global culture awaited. For a lot of reasons and thirty five years later, I’m still here.  If I had to name three, I would say opportunity, love and comfort are the most obvious, but Eudora Welty, Margaret Walker Alexander, William Winter, Willie Morris, Sam Myers, Cassandra Wilson and Charles Evers were a few more.

My best friend Michael Rubenstein made sure I met all the right people and touched all the essential bases in that first year. The music scene was ripe and the community was ready to enjoy a good gathering.  I felt free and empowered, untethered and boundless.  I worked hard and took chances and the climate suited my clothes. And it was home of the great southern, Greek-American “comeback sauce”.

When I presented B.B. King, Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Williams or Dr. John, Ray Charles or John Prine, people came and supported those shows. I called for a parade and people showed up in costumes, ready to march.  I opened clubs and restaurants and people came to eat and drink.  I met every writer who came to Lemuria or The Book Worm and attended every lecture and concert from Allen Ginsberg at Tougaloo to Ace Cannon at Pop’s Around The Corner to James Brown at the Masonic Lodge.

And when I called my brother Hal in 1985 and told him I had the lease on the old GM&O Freight Depot in downtown, he packed his bags and we started construction on what would become Hal & Mal’s, now 30 years and two generations in the making.  And this place we created, would become the organic gathering place of the Jackson we envisioned, a place to eat local food, to hear traditional music and to celebrate our home, our town, our culture.

Rich, diverse, urban and rural, Jackson is an enigma and an oasis.  “Diddy Wah Diddy”, Willie Dixon would say, “ain’t no town, ain’t no city, just a little place called Diddy Wah Diddy”.

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. Please join us and photographer Ken Murphy in celebrating Jackson tonight at 8:00 at Hal and Mal’s. 

Written by Ron Chaney (better known as Chane), who is the creative director of Fondren After 5 and owner of Swell-O-Phonic, Soma, and Studio Chane in Fondren. 

Jackson is in many ways a hidden gem of creativity.  I started realizing this years ago when our store started promoting all-age rock shows.  There were always new bands popping up in an endless fashion.  Today as a shop owner and the creative director of Fondren After 5, I am more certain than ever that there is a growing strength of creatives in Jackson.  I feel Jackson is now a fertile resource  that brings many artists back from other places where many had escaped to learn.  Now many are back bringing knowledge and inspiration from other big cities and the artist revolution is happening – Yes, in Jackson Mississippi.  I am proud to be from here because JXN is now a never-ending supply of the same inspiration that I used to have to chase elsewhere.

Join us tonight at Fondren after 5! We will have tents set up in front of Fondren Corner and Brent’s Drugs. Don’t miss this amazing Jackson event!

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.