Lady Banks' Commonplace Book

Beach Reading.

Dearest Readers,

Her ladyship, the editor is writing this issue of her commonplace book not from her usual place at her kitchen table, but from a warm and windy deck overlooking the ocean on Topsail Beach, NC, where she is spending some time with her family; a brother, a sister, two twin nephews she cannot reliably tell apart, and her own parents, (whom she can).  As a result, she has done rather less reading of books and rather more building of sand castles and attempting (although this is quite outside her experience and province) to teach her nephews how to use a boogie board. 

Nevertheless, her ladyship did bring books to read (because books are as necessary to a beach vacation as sun block and surf boards), and has stolen a few moments in the early mornings and late evenings in which to read them, swinging gently on the porch swing so thoughtfully placed on the deck, and listening to the waves and the wind and the cried of the gulls in the background. She is currently deeply engrossed in Hallam’s War by Elisabeth Payne Rosen, who is interviewed in this newsletter. It is a book her ladyship picked up on the advice of a friend, and one which gives the lie to the belief that women can’t write about the Civil War (her ladyship refuses, on principle, to refer to that event as “The War Between the States” or worse “The Late Unpleasantness.”)

The other book which has absorbed her ladyship’s interest is a debut novel called In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld, a most beautifully written story about a young woman who is attempting to understand her parents—in particular, her mother Addie, a complicated poet, activist, artist and passionate bird watcher.  Hinnefeld is a writer who brings the beauty of language and the beauty of birds together in almost magical concert—but here her ladyship admits to being carried away upon her own flights of fancy.

It is true, however, that she has an affinity with such pursuits as poetry and bird watching, which is why her commonplace book entry for this month is a paean to the pelican, a bird her ladyship has been marveling at all week as it glides, in formation of a half dozen, low over the waves, wings inches from the water’s surface. She has yet to see one catch a fish.

Her ladyship’s favorite bird books:

• Janet Lembke’s Dangerous Birds
• John James Audubon’s Journals
• Peter Cashwell’s The Verb ‘to Bird’
• Sam Keen’s Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds
• Bernd Heinrich’s The Mind of a Raven

Her ladyship, the editor

Authors 'Round the South

Authors Round the South is the home of one of the most extensive listings of literary events in the South, including author readings & appearances, book club meetings, book & literary festivals, open mics, poetry slams and writing groups. No matter what part of the South you live in, you can find a bookstore and author appearance near you!

Book Festivals & Special Events

Pride Day of Local Musicians & Poets at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA  on July 4

Georgia Author Book Bash at Eagle Eye Book Shop in Decatur, GA  on June 29

FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS 2008 at Page After Page in Elizabeth City, NC on June 28

AUTHOR 2 AUTHOR: Elisabeth Payne Rosen Talks to Karen Spears Zacharias

Author/journalist Karen Spears Zacharias is married to a history teacher and Civil War enthusiast. “My husband, Tim, is a James Madison fellow,” Zacharias said. “He rarely reads novels. He prefers his history the way some do their whiskey – straight-up. But when I mentioned to him that Elisabeth Payne Rosen was an acquaintance of Shelby Foote, Tim picked up her debut novel, Hallam’s War and did not put it down until he finished it. He declared it a good tale, well-researched.”

So how did Elisabeth Payne Rosen go about all that research and what was the advice Shelby Foote gave her? Those are a few of the questions Karen Spears Zacharias asked of Rosen, author of Hallam’s War.

Q: How did the story of Hugh & Serena Hallam first present itself to you?

A. It arose from my growing obsession withthe war itself. I was determined to come up with a human story that would interest not only Civil War buffs like myself, but anybody—say an ordinary, intelligent woman--who just loved a good, long narrative with the possibility of actually learning something on the side, a la James Michener. Looking back at my earliest pencil notes (nearly thirty years ago), I see that here was always going to be a three-way tug—not necessarily sexual (though maybe that, too) but in the old issues around moving out into the larger world (or deeper into the inner, hidden one) vs. staying in the same place. I tend to think people are divided into those who are attracted to same and those who are attracted to different. I’m attracted to different.

Q: What intimidated you most -- the research or the writing?  

A. Perhaps foolishly, neither! I didn’t know enough to realize how long it would take me. Besides, what might seem like hard work to others (the research part) was sheer indulgence to me—money for jam, as the Brits would say. I was reading Civil War stuff for years before a friend suggested I take all that passion and turn it into fiction.

Q: Tackling a Civil War novel as your debut project takes some gumption, given the scope of excellent books already on the shelves. How'd you screw up the courage?

 A. I was too naïve, too submerged in the subject, to think beyond what I was doing each day. I was living in England when I began, without much access to all those excellent books you’re talking about--just the few odd volumes I could find at the University of London or the Chelsea Library (e.g., a biography of Stonewall Jackson by a Sandhurst instructor), so I wasn’t intimidated. I was reading all the original documents I could get my hands on in trips back to New York and the South—letters, plantation journals, slave narratives—just eating them up, so the better they were, the better it was for me.

As far as fiction about the Civil War, there really wasn’t much that I knew of, just The Red Badge of Courage, Faulkner’s references to the war through his characters, and of course Gone With the Wind—which wasn’t a War novel at all, in my sense . of the word, but a great, passionate romance set against the backdrop of the war. Now there are Cold Mountain, The March, etc., but at that time, the field felt vast and available. I wanted to write something like War and Peace—(don’t laugh; a cat can look at a queen, right?) with something like Tolstoy’s sense of those two alternating realities: the intimate, human world—the world of love and sociability and connection--as well as the horror (and the thrill, or at least the anticipated thrill) of war.

After I’d been working on my book for about six months, I picked up a copy of the New York Times Book Review and read a long, positive review of some new book about the war. I will never forget what I felt then, my stomach turning upside down: Someone Else has gotten there first. All my work down the drain. Then I pulled myself together, reread the review and thought: well, they didn’t do “my” battles. I’m safe.” Pretty soon after that, it dawned on me that there were always books about the Civil War out there and always would be; that there was a market for them, just as there is for romances or mystery stories, and that initial pressure to cross the finish line became a release: I had all the time in the world.

Q: This idea -- that the slave (i.e. victim) has power to be an agent of change -- is this a veiled commentary on our current societal ills more so than on that of the Civil War era?

A. I’ve been working on this book for so long—and had put it aside for ten years, until three years ago—that its connection with the electrifying conversation about race that’s going on right now in our country is pure chance—though a chance I welcome. The fact is, the issues that were roiling the country in 1859—the threat of secession, the hardening of attitudes and opinions between the North and the South—the blindness to each other and to ourselves—were uncannily like those of today.

 What was it that my characters couldn’t see then? What was it I had struggled so hard in my own life to face and to incorporate into my own understanding?

Q: Serena wrangles with the inequity of having her slaves run off at a time when she needed them most. After all she & Hugh had been so diligent to treat their slaves with dignity, whereas her neighbor Ross McQuirter, had mistreated his horribly, yet, few of them had the courage to leave. This, of course, makes one wonder if it pays to be good people, doesn't it? And yet, begs the question of how we define "good people". Do good people own others?

A.    Hmmm, a lot of questions there. It seems to me that if you treat people as actual human beings, then even within the cruelty and lack of freedom of the slave system, they will live into that humanity. Part of that achieved humanity is the time and space to think—and thinking is always dangerous!

There were at least two situations on southern plantations that led to slaves running away. On the one hand, extreme and unremitting brutality, where being killed or mangled by dogs was not worse than what you were already enduring; and on the other, the more humane, more socially complex situations that encouraged slaves to use their intelligence and, as a side effect, allowed the imagination to develop. Which in turn led to figuring out how to escape.

The second part of your question, the moral question (Who is a “good” man or woman, and how could he or she own slaves?) is what I wanted to explore in the book. I wrote it to find out how that was possible, and it’s fair to say that I didn’t have the answer until very close to the end. Or maybe I still don’t.

Q: Do you think your own spiritual/moral wranglings manifested themselves in this story? If so, how?

A: Unquestionably, yes. Not about slavery in particular, at least not at the beginning. I was, growing up in the South, a “good Christian girl”, i.e., I constantly asked God to forgive me all my terrible sins, which mostly consisted of things like looking at myself in the mirror. It was only when my moral consciousness began to grow, sometime in late adolescence, that I began to understand that my failure to see what was going on around me was not the same as innocence. The concepts of sight and seeing are very important in my book.

Q. Talk a little about Hugh and Serena, about why they feel so real.

A. Well, they are just deeply in love with each other and have been since the first moment they met. It is a powerful physical connection, one that serves them well when they disagree on smaller points.

I myself am the child of a long, strong marriage, and my husband and I just celebrated our 41st anniversary, so I know something about that. I tried to be careful not to make Hugh and Serena modern figures; they are not. They are like us, but living in a very different time, when the roles of men and women were somewhat (though not altogether) different from what they are today.
In a sense, Hugh is most vulnerable in his love for Serena; more vulnerable, in a way, than she. We feel her excitement as she is asked to take on more responsibility after Hugh leaves for the war: the dual sense of freedom and a kind of disloyalty, when she’s on her own at Palmyra and then in Richmond. She both misses Hugh deeply and painfully , yet is enjoying herself, too.

Q: Tell us about your relationship with Shelby Foote. How did that come about? Did he know you were at work on this? What advice did he give you?

A. Shelby Foote had gone to high school in Greenville (Miss.) with one of my uncles, and I used that connection to write and tell him I was coming to Memphis. When we finally met, over a cheeseburger at the Holiday Inn, I thought I had died and gone to heaven: for the first time, here was another person as demented as myself on the subject, a person for whom the figures of that constantly re-lived time were realer than those of our own. The only “advice” he gave me—and I got it from his conversation and imagination, not from anything he said—was just to give free rein to that dementia, to let that crazy person loose! To go farther inside my characters and let them live outwards from there.

Q: Writers sometimes dream about the characters they create. Did you have any dreams about Serena, Lewis, or French, or any of the other characters?

A. That’s a very interesting question to me, because I dream a lot and have kept dream journals over the years. I can’t say I ever dreamed about any of the characters you mention, yet I had dreams that came to me as whole scenes—or rather, certain scenes came to me whole, as if from a dream, and I accepted them as they came, unchanged. For example, when Hugh glimpses Ross McQuirter and the slave girl, Mary Ann, at the revival meeting. People have asked me what that meant, as in, “did I miss something?” But I left it at that. It works on a plot level, if you follow it through; it’s legitimate in that sense. But that’s not what I like about it. I like the fact that we know so little about human personality; that every other human being is a mystery to us. A sacred mystery. Even a villain like Ross.

Q: Eudora Welty said place endows a writer. In what way has place equipped you as a writer?

A. Where to start? I grew up in Louisiana, but I have always known myself to have been of and from the Mississippi Delta, where my father and his six brothers were born and raised. When I stand barefoot on the Delta earth, I feel like there are roots growing down from the bottoms of my feet. I set Palmyra in a fictional West Tennessee, somewhere northeast of Memphis, but it’s the Delta that’s in my DNA.

Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned about yourself through the writing of Hallam's War?

A. I’ve had to think about that one for a while. I guess the answer is: that I had the discipline and follow-through to actually do it, to finish this long and ambitious project. I had always thought of myself as lazy, indolent, in love with comfort--like Serena. But those are the things we tell ourselves about ourselves, or that others plant the seeds of, very early on. In my case, I just loved to lie on the grass and dream and imagine. I never connected it with a specific, larger ambition. At least not this one. 

Southern Author Blogs

A Good Blog is Hard to Find:
Karen Spears Zacharais on The Jesus Drop ‘n Roll

I'd never been to a church where folks chant out loud until I went with Miz Betty. It's what my people refer to as "high church." I guess because it's a throw-back to the Anglican church of their Irish and English roots. My people were not high church kind of folks. My people got mixed with the whooping-n-hollering bunch long ago, and have become forever twined with that group. I think it's because it was the closest they could get on a Sunday morning to a Saturday night binge. Or maybe it's because when they showed up on Sunday morning nobody could tell if they were hungover or just slain in the spirit. . .Read more

Sharyn McCrumb on Magical Realism in Appalachia:

Anne is driving alone down a dark forest road when she swerves to avoid a deer, sending her car into the ditch. Anne is unable to get the car out of the ditch, but she gets out to survey the damage.

If at this point a group of elves comes out of the forest and puts Anne’s car back on the road for her, you know you are reading a fantasy narrative. However, if Anne uses her cell phone to call AAA, and while she is waiting for the tow truck to arrive, some elves come out of the forest and stand around telling her what a bad driver she is-- but they don’t move the car and they depart before the tow truck arrives, leaving no trace of their having been there-- then the narrative you are reading is magic realism. . .Read more

Literary Gossip & News

News of a literary nature

The tenuous boundary between spring (May) and Summer (June) was filled with literary news both wonderful and sad. Under sad, her ladyship marks with distress the passing of George Garrett, Mathew Bruccoli and Tasha Tudor (Ms. Tudor is not, naturally, a southerner but happens to have been a favorite of her ladyship’s, who treasures her Tudor-illustrated version of A Secret Garden and a small but delightful book called Snow Before Christmas.

Under “wonderful” her ladyship must put the notice she received of a new children’s bookstore in Alexandria, VA—Hooray for Books, which is both the name of the store, and an excellent expression of her ladyship’s own opinion.  Her ladyship was also most interested to read about the evolution of Book Sense – the program that promotes the recommendations of independent booksellers –into IndieBound, a much broader movement of grass roots activism for local businesses. Naturally, her ladyship believes passionately in her local booksellers—they are most reliable in their literary tastes and quite as committed to the importance of good literature as she is herself. IndieBound seems to take their passion and commitment a step, indeed many steps, further. Her ladyship’s favorite tag line? “Doing our part to keep America interesting.” We each, after all, have a story to tell.

Recommended by Your Neighborhood Southern Booksellers

What Was Lost: A Novel by Catherine O'Flynn
(Holt, $14 paper, 9780805088335 / 0805088334)

"With irreverent wit and sharp insight, O'Flynn weaves a mesmerizing tale of a precocious missing girl and the people who surround her. By tapping into emotions with ease and grace, this book wonderfully weaves together characters and the love that even loss can't affect." --Meaghan Leenaarts, Island Bookstore, Corolla, NC

The Secret Scripture: A Novel by Sebastian Barry
(Viking, $24.95, 9780670019403 / 0670019402)

"Barry's novel of Roseanne McNulty, now in her hundredth year in an Irish mental hospital, is a haunting story of memory and how small decisions can have large consequences. The writing was such a treat that I actually got to the last page late one night and saved it until the next morning. I didn't want to read it until I was fully awake and could relish the end." --Rona Brinlee, The Book Mark, Atlantic Beach, FL

Chosen Forever: A Memoir by Susan Richards
(Soho, $23, 9781569474921 / 1569474923)

"Susan Richard has written a sequel to Chosen by A Horse, her wonderful memoir. Her new book relates how the publication of Chosen totally changed her life, connecting her to friends and family from whom she was estranged, and to a man who became the love of her life." --Nancy Olson, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC

Bookseller Blogs

Fiction Addiction: Joan Bauer’s new book, Peeled (Putnam, hardcover, $16.99), features Hildy Biddle, ace high school reporter. Hildy lives in Upstate New York in the normally quiet, peaceful town of Banesville, where life centers around the apple orchards and other agricultural pursuits. When the new owner of the town’s only paper begins playing up rumors of a violent ghost haunting an abandoned farm, Hildy learns an important lesson about journalistic ethics.  Bauer, a Newbery Honor author, is known for creating strong, independent, witty, female teenaged characters such as Hildy. . . Read more

Consuming Books:Rabbit in the Moon (Oceanview Publishing) is a page-turner.  The novel takes place during the two weeks prior to the Tiananmen Square tragedy on June 4, 1989, where protesting students were overrun by Chinese troops, resulting in hundreds, perhaps thousands of deaths.

Against that background, the novel tells the story of Lili Quan, the only child of an immigrant mother, who raises her daughter in San Francisco.  Lili is a medical resident when we meet her, working in a Los Angeles hospital.   She is lured to China as a medical researcher, but the Communist government wants Lili more for her connection to her grandfather.   Dr. Cheng, Lili’s grandfather, is hiding a valuable secret from the government.  Throw in a couple of attractive young men, a rogue CIA agent, an American travel group of seniors and you have a fast-paced and steamy story! . . .Read more

Little Shop of Stories:Doesn’t it always come back to the Trojan War?
What's been interesting about looking at all these books that tackle the Greek myths is the way they come at the familiar tales from so many different directions. Recently I found two books that both have Helen of Troy as either the main character or a major character, and, as you will see, you couldn't get two more different takes on the "face that launched a thousand ships.". . .Read more

A Reading Life: “Why do you keep books that you’ve already read? What drives you to hold onto a book?”

These questions were posted some time ago to one of my message boards by a woman who, it turned out, was in the middle of moving house and was feeling rather daunted by the sheer amount of stuff she had to pack. One sympathizes. 

I, however, had just finished my fifth cup of coffee that morning, so fueled with jittery caffeine-induced inspiration, I tapped out a quick tongue-in-cheek reply:

• Pure unadulterated greed.
• The same kind of panic about not having anything to read that caused my mother-in-law to fill closets full of toilet paper so she would never, ever have to face running out.
• The bookcases act as sound dampeners for the band during practices.
• They also mean I don’t have to bother with putting pictures up on the walls.
• When the big one hits and Armageddon is upon us, all knowledge will not be lost as long as my living room stays relatively intact.
• Books make me happy.

. .Read more

Wordsmiths Books Blog:(as appearing on A Good Blog is Hard to Find) The nutso book world (with a lament for Crystal Pepsi):

My job (as marketing and publicity director for Wordsmiths Books) puts me into a strange sort of working-contact with publishing industry celebrities. I say “a strange sort of working contact” because it’s hard to feel super-cool and ultra-spectacular when you’re straddling a plastic picnic table covered by a sheer white cloth, holding a $35 hardback flapped open and pressed against the table with one hand while simultaneously attempting to ready another book to the same position with the other hand, all so that Mr. or Ms. JonesBoughtTheBookAtBordersAndBroughtItIn can get his or her five or ten seconds to tell CelebriAuthor how much their book/movie/tv show/guest spot on Grey’s Anatomy/theory behind the meaning of the polar bears on LOST means to them.

(Her Ladyship notes: The usual Wordsmiths Blog can be found at http://blog.wordsmithsbooks.com/ , but her ladyship veered away from the site today because she has an antipathy towards web graphics that shimmer, blink, move, wiggle or all of the above, as they do at this post, which, it must be noted, her ladyship—not one to suffer from dyslexia, keeps reading as “Black and Red Porn” rather than how it was intended). . . Read more

Yikes and Away! The blog of A Sense of Humor Bookstore

Weird words :  The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by  adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new  definition.  Here are this year's winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form a real word. Some are terrifically innovative:

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting  a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
 2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly. . .Read more

Lady Banks’ Commonplace Book

A Paean to the Pelican

“A good many birds lead double lives, one as a real bird tending to its own avian affairs, the other as the feathered, flying embodiment of some human idea. A dove is a dove and a symbol of peace. An eagle is itself and at the same time has been appropriated for its fierce, wild majesty to serve as the emblem of a nation. The vulture is not merely an efficient undertaker but a dark-robed fortune-teller predicting death before it occurs. Crows and owls may also bode ill, and ravens, as everybody knows, now and forevermore shall croak negative comments. To counter such gloom, let bluebirds bring in the happiness for which they’re famed.  Let robins always represent spring. And some kinds of birds go even farther; they don’t stop simply at giving tangible form to ideas and feelings but offer continuing, reproductive proof of mythical times—the kingfisher that was a queen, the osprey and woodpeckers that were and ever shall be kings. Between most birds and what they’re thought to represent, there’s some benign congruity at work.

But not for the pelican. Though the bird I see flying over North Carolina’s river Neuse, the bird selected by Louisiana as its official mascot, behaves as it was impeccably programmed to do some thirty to forty million years ago, it’s haunted by a host of shadow birds. The trouble is, people can’t seem to agree about the pelican. Is it a risible Rube Goldberg contraption, a patchwork assemblage of unlikely parts that just happens to catch fish? Or is its awkward-looking construction really a modest, Lincolnesque disguise for shining excellence and inward beauty?"

--Janet Lembke, Dangerous Birds (Lyons & Burford, 1992)

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