(Clarksdale, MS) – Since its world premiere in April, the new blues documentary “We Juke Up in Here” has earned rave reviews from audiences and critics alike. In the coming weeks, the film will enjoy an even higher profile as its filmmakers and featured musicians embark on a series of high-profile screenings and public performances in the United States and abroad. “We Juke Up in Here” tells the story of Mississippi’s once-thriving culture of down-home blues clubs known as juke joints. It is available in a deluxe two-disc collection (DVD with CD soundtrack). “We Juke Up in Here” is a joint production of Broke & Hungry Records and Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art.

“We Juke Up In Here” follows music producers Konkel and Stolle as they explore what remains of Mississippi’s once-thriving juke joint culture. The film is told largely from the vantage point of Red Paden, proprietor of the legendary Red’s Lounge in historic Clarksdale, Mississippi. Featured artists include Terry “Harmonica” Bean, Big George Brock, Hezekiah Early, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Robert Lee “Lil’ Poochie” Watson, Elmo Williams and Louis “Gearshifter” Youngblood.

“We Juke Up in Here” is a follow-up to the award-winning film “M For Mississippi.” The new movie reunites Konkel and Stolle with Damien Blaylock, their cinematographer and co-producer from the earlier film. Joining the production team for “We Juke Up in Here” was cinematographer and co-producer Lou Bopp.

Jackson’s screening will be held at Cathead Vodka Distillery.

Join filmmakers Damien Blaylock, Jeff Konkel and Roger Stolle for a screening of their latest film “We Juke Up in Here” at the Cathead Vodka Distillery in Gluckstadt, Mississippi on Friday, October 26!

Food & Drink at 7:00

Screening of “We Juke Up in Here” at 8:00

644 Church Rd Suite 1, Madison, Mississippi 39110

Click here for a map on the Facebook Event Page.

“We Juke Up in Here” is available in a deluxe two-disc collection (DVD with CD soundtrack) at Lemuria. You can purchase in store or order on our website for $29.99 + shipping.

I have two stories to share about Miss Welty’s Delta Wedding. Marion Barnwell, a Delta native, shares her experience of reading Delta Wedding as a teenager. The other story is from Karl Marlantes who many of you might have met when he came to the bookstore on two separate occasions for Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. Both of these stories are unique testaments to the power of Miss Welty’s writing. -Lisa

It was a hot summer day in Indianola, deep in the Mississippi Delta. I was fourteen. Some plan or other had fallen through to get together with a friend, and I was bored. Bored! Only one thing to do—pester my mother. More effectively than Chinese water torture, I repeated “I’m bored” a few hundred times to get her to stop what she was doing to entertain me. Instead, she went over to a shelf, selected a book, and handed it to me. “Read this,” she said. “It’s about the Delta.”

“Our Delta?” I asked in disbelief. “This boring place?”

“Our Delta,” she repeated. “Our very Delta.”

The book she handed me was Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding. By making that particular choice, she handed me so much more. No other book on earth could better have expanded my sense of self. I was—we were important. We must be. Someone had written a book about us.

That gift was the spark for a continuing passion for reading, which led to my pursuing a career as an English teacher and as a writer. I still marvel at my mother’s choice. For who better than Welty could use all the senses to make a particular place come alive? Who better to teach me that if I was bored, then I just wasn’t looking?

–Marion Barnwell

 The following is from Publisher’s Weekly – The title is “Why I Write” but it could  just as well be titled “Why I read” – a truly great piece. You might have read this story before on our blog but I love it so much and feel it is worth sharing again. -Lisa

by Karl Marlantes — Publishers Weekly, 1/25/2010

Having read a galley of my novel, Matterhorn, about Marines in Vietnam, a somewhat embarrassed woman came up to me and said, “I didn’t even know you guys slept outside.” She was college educated and had been an active protester against the war. I felt that my novel had built a small bridge.

The chasm that small bridge crossed is still wide and deep in this country. I remember being in uniform in early 1970, delivering a document to the White House, when I was accosted by a group of students waving Vietcong and North Vietnamese flags. They shouted obscenities and jeered at me. I could only stand there stunned, thinking of my dead and maimed friends, wanting desperately to tell these students that my friends and I were just like them: their age, even younger, with the same feelings, yearnings, and passions. Later, I quite fell for a girl who was doing her master’s thesis on D. H. Lawrence. Late one night we were sitting on the stairs to her apartment and I told her that I’d been a Marine in Vietnam. “They’re the worst,” she cried, and ran up the stairs, leaving me standing there in bewilderment.

After the war, I worked as a business consultant to international energy companies to support a family, eventually being blessed with five children. I began writing Matterhorn in 1975 and for more than 30 years, I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. Certainly, writing the novel was a way of dealing with the wounds of combat, but why would I subject myself to the further wounds all writers receive trying to get published? I think it’s because I’ve wanted to reach out to those people on the other side of the chasm who delivered the wound of misunderstanding. I wanted to be understood.

Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person.

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

———

If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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As much as oil figures into politics, war, and finally into our daily lifestyles, there is another resource which we often take for granted: water. Water has always been humankind’s most pivotal resource and today, water, not oil, is the resource of the 21st century. As 20 percent of our planet already experiences fresh water scarcity and 40 percent do not have adequate sanitation, Steven Solomon explores the realities and challenges of a planet that will increasingly find itself in conflict over water.

From antiquity to the Industrial Revolution, Water is an engaging narrative capturing the struggles, personalities, and inventions that have shaped our use of water. Water management presents our planet with some of the most challenging economic, political and environmental problems. Solomon presents a harsh reality but not without the hope that our ingenuity will find a way to manage water humanely. Aptly selected as the opening quote is Benjamin Franklin’s old adage: When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water. Solomon’s book is one we should all have in hand.

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Soloman, Harper Collins, 2011.

This review will be featured on The Book Shelf of Mississippi’s very own magazine Well-Being. We are proud to contribute to Well-Being and always enjoy working with the Well-Being team. Mississippi is lucky to have such a great magazine and Lemuria has copies to pick-up for free at the Fiction Desk! Well-Being magazine is great way to keep up with local healthy events and fitness activities. You can also follow Well-Being on Facebook.

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I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I’d been trained to think war was the great unifier, that it brought people closer together than any other activity on earth. Bullshit. War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today? Dying would be one way. If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not.

I’m not really sure how to tell you how enjoyable Mary Oliver’s new collection of poetry, A Thousand Mornings is. The poems she doles out are delicate and easy to read, but they linger with you, long after you’ve turned the page.

I read an interview with Mary Oliver in which she shared her writing process. She hides pencils and small scraps of paper along the trail she walks every morning, just in case she forgot her notebook, and needs to write something down. “Most mornings I’m up to see the sun, and that rising of the light moves me very much, and I’m used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens,” she said in an interview this morning with NPR.

Mary Oliver has become well known for the natural world she recreates so well on the page (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984). She makes it look easy. In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver does the same, but her poems are a little more diverse then her last several volumes. Bob Dylan makes a cameo appearance (what could be better?), as does the poet William Blake.

I Go Down to the Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall–

what should I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.