Written by David McCarty

Preternatural Knowledge: When I am shopping for my teenaged niece, I can tilt into Oz and say “she loves science, she is interested in
robotics, nothing with a pink cover, female protagonist” and not even a second passes before someone says “this is what you MUST get.” They are always right.

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters: in one of the
Secret Vaults of Lemuria (not unlike Uncle Scrooge’s money bin), there is a small bound volume of a talk given by two people at Millsaps College a few years ago. One was the artist Eudora Alice Welty, the other a person named Walker Percy. They spoke about post-apocalyptic perceptions of the New South. It is signed by both; she in her spidery cursive, he with a bolder sloping smear. For people of a certain faith, touching this little book is like taking communion.

Preternatural Knowledge, Part II: That when I walk to the counter
with an armload of books, sometimes Maggie hesitates—then says “who is this one for?” I’ll tell, and then she’ll gently say “why don’t you consider . . . .?” And point me to a different novel or collection.

She is always right.

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters, part II: Often musicians at a certain stage in life put pen to paper or keys to
screen to memorialize their travels, although it is sometimes
difficult to capture the grunts and screams of their instruments and
their fans from over the many decades. Lemuria has a soft spot for
these artists (indeed, if Lemuria were working itself through college,
music would be its night gig after a daytime of moving print). The
opportunity to hear from people who created the fabric of time + space (or those who chronicled their creation) can be transcendent.

Over the years, I have heard Robert Gordon reveal details about Muddy Waters, like a craftsman scraping faded paint from a mansion; Steve Earle mumble about life in the dark parts of Nashville; and towering over them all, because of Lemuria, shake the hand of Bobby Keys, who played saxophone on “Brown Sugar,” by the recording artists the Rolling Stones. Bobby Keys, who may or may not have played on “Return to Sender,” by Elvis Aron Presley; who for sure played on two different records with John Winston Ono Lennon. He signed a Carly Simon record for me.

Preternatural Knowledge, Part III: when a 33 1/3 book came in once about a Black Sabbath album, written by John Darnielle, my friend Simon (working at L at the time) tweeted at me that he was reserving me a copy, and that I needed to get up there and pick it up. He was right.

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters, part III: there is a guitarist from Tennessee named Winfield Scott Moore, III. In the 1950s, he played with a group called the Blue Moon Boys. Their lead singer and rhythm guitarist was billed sometimes as the Hillbilly Cat, or the Memphis Flash, or in a few cases, the King of Western Bop. The guitarist wrote a book, and Lemuria had him come speak about it.

I didn’t come to the event, on purpose, because I worried that if I
met Scotty Moore, who recorded “That’s All Right” with Elvis in 1954, that I would become overwhelmed, and start to cry.

Written by William Kirkpatrick

I first experienced Lemuria while in early elementary school in the old Highland Village location. I recall my babysitter at the time worked there as a part time job while she was in high school. Writing this narrative caused me to pause and consider just how far the reach of Lemuria extends beyond the boundaries of Jackson and Mississippi. I’ve lived in Leesburg, VA in the suburbs of Washington DC for almost 10 years while my previously mentioned babysitter was residing in Singapore the last time I had an update on her whereabouts. I suspect there are countless other stories of displaced Mississippians who have had their lives touched in some form or fashion by their experiences at Lemuria.

I grew up in Jackson and have lived all over the South since finishing at MSU in 1993 – Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, back to Atlanta, before being asked by my employer to move to the Washington DC area in 2006. As a Mississippian and proud Southerner by heart, moving to DC seemed no different than being asked to move to New York, Detroit, or Toronto – it might as well have been the North Pole. To say we were apprehensive would be a huge understatement. It certainly wasn’t the South – even though all my new neighbors from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey seemed to think it was. Fast forward to present time and I have to share that Leesburg, VA has been a wonderful place to live, but it’s still not the South.

Our boys were 3 and 5 when we arrived in Leesburg. It dawned on me shortly after arrival that if we didn’t make an effort to do so, they would grow up without understanding their Southern roots of a Dad from Jackson and their Mom and my wife Sylvia from New Orleans. I also noticed I was missing The South – other than catfish, sweat tea, and BBQ, I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that I was missing, but I found a big part of it in Southern Literature. Lemuria played a large role in making that happen. I joined their First Editions Club several years ago and eagerly anticipate the monthly delivery, often working with Adie to add several additional signed first editions to my shipment. For those who say the internet killed the independent bookstore, I can share that without it I would have never known about, let alone joined the First Editions Club.

If you need a reminder of just what being a Southerner is all about – both the good and the bad , grab a copy of William Alexander Percy’s “Lanterns on the Levee”, Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”, John Barry’s “Rising Tide”, or countless other wonderful books by historically well-known authors like Willie Morris, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner or Shelby Foote. If you prefer a more recent time in South, Lemuria has you covered there as well with Ace Atkins, Greg Iles, and of course John Grisham along with countless others. I had never cried when reading a book until earlier this year when I reached the end of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton in his debut novel. It was the best book I have read in many years. If you haven’t read it, you need to get to Lemuria and pick up a copy.

I’ll close by saying that I have had many reasons to come back to Jackson over the years to visit family. In February 2014 that changed when I spent a month with my Mom in Jackson when she had to be placed in hospice care at the end of her battle with cancer. Her 2nd husband and I took turns staying with her on 24 hour shifts at the hospice facility in Ridgeland. The first week I was there helping Mom was interrupted by my Grandma passing away at St. Catherine’s Village in Madison. To say it was a tough month would be an understatement as it left me with a much smaller family and no remaining relatives in Mississippi. The one place that I gravitated to almost every day after my time taking care of Mom ended was Lemuria. I would estimate that I visited Lemuria 15-20 times that month. I never told anyone why I was there and was treated with the same Southern hospitality I had always enjoyed. For those hours, I was able to be at peace in a different world from the one I had just left.

Our boys are now 11 and 14 and are well on their way to understanding their Southern roots. They have been to Lemuria many times and for several years it has been their idea to go there instead of mine. We don’t get to Jackson as much as we used to and it will probably remain that way for a while, but one of the ways we stay connected is through Lemuria and getting book recommendations from Adie and Clara. The other parts of their Southern Education center around Mississippi State football games and family vacations in Orange Beach. We just smile when people act like we are crazy for vacationing on the Gulf Coast rather than the wonderful nearby beaches in Delaware and Maryland. If only they knew, yet we are happy that they don’t.

Written by Matthew Guinn. Matthew will be joining us on on Saturday, May 2 as a Guest Bookseller to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day!

Let me tell you what an independent bookstore can do: it can change everything.

I came to Mississippi in 1992, an aspiring writer though not yet ready to admit it, and encountered Lemuria that fall. I say encounter because Lemuria was not like all the other bookstores I had known, but something bigger and better, sui generis. You do not shop in Lemuria; rather, you discover and consume. Between the bold yellow walls and bright green carpet, the signed photos of every significant American author of the last fifty years on the walls not covered with bookshelves, in the nooks and crannies of arcane subject matter, under the blues or jazz pouring out of the speakers in the store, one is reminded of the joyful truth that the world will never run out of books. Or curators of them, which is what Johnny Evans is, of the foremost rank.

I have seen Barry Moser’s King James Bible at Lemuria. I have met Jim Harrison at Lemuria. And of the southern legends, every one. Hanging around Lemuria over the years has been like getting another degree in literature. Without the lectures. Just all plot, all action. The only test is whether you are paying close enough attention.

And I have a novel on the shelves of Lemuria, and on the shelves of other stores, elsewhere, because of my friendships there.

The conventional route to getting published did not work for me. I had a manuscript, The Resurrectionist, with a literary agent in New York. She pitched it to the major publishing houses—19 of them—and got rejection after rejection. Then she pitched me.

Rejection led to dejection. Then one afternoon, just after he walked into the house from school, my eleven-year-old son asked about the manuscript. I told him it was in my desk drawer, most likely permanently. I did not tell Braiden that there were desk drawers like mine all over the country, the world. Where most likely the majority of novels end up, musty as the languishing dreams of the men and women who wrote them. But you can’t speak that harsh truth to a child. And I’m glad I didn’t, because Braiden then said (and I swear this is verbatim, better than anything I’m capable of imagining): “Dad, nobody writes a book just to put it in a drawer.”

Call it the Tao of Kid, the little Buddha of elementary school. The cafeteria Confucius. Regardless, it felt like scales dropped from my eyes. I heard him. This was one of the times I was paying attention.

So I gave it another shot, the best one I could think of. My friend Joe Hickman, the manager of Lemuria, had expressed an interest in reading my manuscript. I took it to him.

He called me one Sunday evening—February 13, 2011—after spending the weekend reading the book. “It’s really good,” he said. “We gotta get it published.”

Now is not the time to point out the obvious, I thought. Instead, I tried to focus on the enthusiasm in his voice. But the reality of us “getting it published” from little Jackson, Mississippi, when an agent working full-time in New York couldn’t get the job done, was hard to deny.

I should have remembered the parable of the mustard seed. Or maybe the mustard-yellow walls of Lemuria.

Because the first opportunity Joe had to pitch my manuscript to a visiting author turned out to be the only time he had to do it. As my quasi-agent, Joe batted a thousand from his first time up at the plate.

“Come down and meet Andre Dubus,” Joe said. “He’ll be here next month for Townie. He was a friend of Larry Brown’s, too. Maybe he can help you out.”

It’s a rare day that I don’t want to be at Lemuria, or meet a real writer, but I was uncomfortable about meeting Andre because I hadn’t read any of his work. I’d been taught by one of my best professors at UGA that it was the apotheosis of rudeness for a scholar to approach an author without having read something of his or hers. How much worse, I thought, for a creative writer to do the same thing—and hoping for a favor, to boot.

“Can’t do it,” I said. “I haven’t read a thing of Andre’s.”

“He’s a cool guy,” Joe said. “He won’t mind.”

“I doubt it. And anyway, I teach Wednesday nights.”

“Your loss,” Joe said.

As the date of Andre’s reading approached, I realized that the particular Wednesday night in March that Andre was to be at Lemuria was Tulane’s spring break. No class. When Joe learned that, I was on the hook.

Andre gave a fantastic and moving reading from Townie, signed books as long as people remained in line. The crowd dwindled down to some cousins who’d ridden over from Louisiana to have dinner with their famous kinsman. Otherwise it was just Andre, Joe, and myself. While Joe handed Andre books to sign from a stack of stock, he waved me over to the table and introduced me.

“I haven’t read any of your work,” I blurted. I figured I’d go ahead and get the unpleasantness over with and head home.

“That’s all right,” Andre said. “I gave a signed copy of House of Sand and Fog to my best friend back home. First edition. Next time I was over at his place it was propping up one leg of his couch and his dog had chewed on it. I said, ‘Please tell me you read it before you stuck it under there.’ ‘Andre,’ he said, ‘I stay busy.’”

“Matt was a friend of Larry’s,” Joe said. “He’s written a novel. I’ve read it. It’s good.”

“Oh yeah?” Andre said, still signing away as quickly as Joe could pass him the books. “What’s it called?”

“The Resurrectionist.”

“The Resurrectionist?” He asked. I nodded.

He put down his pen and said, “Holy shit! With a title like that, it’s got to be good.” Then he stood up and hugged me. “Will you send it to me? If I like it, I’ll give it to my editor at Norton.”

Just like that. Years of writing nights and weekends, hoping this one would be good enough. (My first, Murk, a novel of catfish grabbling, had long since gone to sleep with the fishes, where, sadly, it belongs.) A New York agent, then nineteen rejections. Then no agent at all. And here in quiet Jackson, Mississippi, on a rainy spring night in the cinderblock bunker annex that Lemuria calls its dot-com building, everything changed.

A year and a half later, W.W. Norton published The Resurrectionist and I had a reading of my own in the dot-com building. I’ve tried to figure it out, the sceptic in me running one scenario after another—the cumulative effects of spending time around good people; networks; chaos theory, etc. That maybe Andre sensed in me a particularly acute case of The Desperation of the Unpublished and took pity. But my better self, the one that now and then cuts through the white noise and reminds me to witness the mystery that surrounds us in the world every day, knows better.

The only thing I’ve concluded definitely is that my break couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Or any other way. Call it A Lemuria Event.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a damned-near-perfect love story of a reader and a bookstore, a shared history, a friendship. I certainly could not have written it any better.

That is why, if my family someday decides to scatter my ashes, they need to save a pinch or two for Lemuria. To sprinkle over the green carpet in the southern writers section. Under a shelf where maybe, maybe still, there will rest a book with my name on its spine.

Matthew Guinn’s next novel, The Scribe, will be published by W.W. Norton in September 2015.

Written by Peggy Hayes Van Devender

While Lemuria does not have the creaking floors, old wood shelving, and stern overseer as my first tabernacle (the original Meridian Public Library) I still pause before entering, less with reverence than anticipation. My first pilgrimage was many years ago to the two-story back side pocket of Highland Village. I do not remember how I learned of this chapel, for I lived a world away in Philadelphia, a temporarily retired schoolteacher, a wife, and a young mother. I assume it was the newspaper. However, I soon found the trips to the pediadontist and zoo detoured to this rarified air.
Even though I have appreciated the progress of the newsletter and fb page, I am drawn to the constant–books and those who read. I do still worship at the feet of the man wrote Spotted Horses, the woman who wrote ” A Worn Path,” and the Dane’s prophet; however, I enjoy the added flavor of mystery and history, my current leanings. I have appreciated Lemuria’s deacons helping me past Barr and Isaacson to Atkins and Berry.
Because of “miles to go,” I have rarely made a book signing event but I love knowing of those gifts. This supplicant did make it to one with Willie Morris, a true blessing. Furthermore, as someone who prefers local to chain , I appreciate the crusade of the independent in the congregation of City Lights, Page and Palette, and Square Books.
Alas, as I sit in my swing this glorious day, I can only lament that I just finished The Man Who Would Not Be Washington, for I do not have another at hand. I fear I underestimated my consumption until the next visit to hallowed halls. What about a branch in a small town? I do not know Mosaic law well, but I know the DDS.

Last year, the state of California gathered its reading heads together and decided that there needed to be a day, one day more special than all of the rest, to celebrate its independent bookstores. The turnout was phenomenal. All over the state, people jumped into action to support their local stores and to shout from the rooftops why shopping indie mattered.

Here I was, tucked away in the tiniest corner of the country thinking to myself, “Huh. That’s not a bad idea. I’m a little . . . . . jealous.” Thankfully, I’m not the only one who was inspired by California’s bright idea, and when it was announced that Independent Bookstore Day deserved to go national, we were, like, so totally in.

So what does this mean for YOU? Well it means that first of all, you should come to Lemuria on Saturday, May 2, and just exist. Visit your favorite section, pick out the prettiest book, plop down on the floor, and read it. It also means that we will be giving out free tote bags to the first 50 customers (our hours are 8:00-7:00), and serving $1 beer all day. And also, here’s an insider’s tip for Mother’s Day: you can get 10% off any copy of Jackson: Photographs by Ken Murphy.

Katie Hathcock with Music for Aardvarks will host a special story time at 11:00, and Paul from Beanfruit Coffee will be here brewing delicious drinks for those who don’t want beer. Want some fresh recommendations? There will be special guest booksellers working throughout the day! Want to get 10% off any purchase here? Tag @lemuriabooks and use the hashtag #IndependentBookstoreDay. Then show us your post when you’re at the register and voila! 10% off! Finally, 5% of all sales throughout the day will go to future Mississippi Book Festivals.

Look, I’m going to be honest. I’m trying to make even more awesome stuff happen this Saturday, but I’m getting tired because between each sentence that I wrote, I got up and yelled, “INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY IS MAY 2.” So maybe just come to the store on May 2 to experience the party yourself. We can’t wait to see you all there.

Oh, P.S., Want to write for us? We’d love to hear from you. Tell us why Lemuria is important to you, and you may be featured on next week’s blog series for Independent Bookstore Day! Email submissions to hannah@lemuriabooks.com by April 28.