#3: A Mississippi photo dump
Where we wonder how a restaurant in the home of Faulker doesn't have gravy
I’m continuing to violate that whole “once a month” promise I made in the first newsletter, I know, but we’re asking forgiveness rather than permission in the house this week.
Got the chance to drive down last week to Oxford, Mississippi with my friend and fellow writer Rob D. Smith for the Oxford Conference for the Book. Neither of us had been to Oxford, which is as good of an excuse for a road trip as any, but also our friend S. A. Cosby was speaking at a panel on Southern noir, and another rule of the house is you go to support the home team.
Also on the panel was Megan Abbott, Ace Atkins, and Eli Cranor. This was some top-shelf stuff, and listening to them discuss the importance of ritual, the influence of Elmore Leonard, or Southern noir as “the gospel of the dispossessed” was to hear exceptional storytellers share what drives them and their writing.
This being Mississippi, a tornado started to loom over the town not long after the panel, and the university shut down the remainder of the day’s events. Being writers, we did what you’d expect: We sheltered in place at the hotel bar and spent hours talking, drinking, eating wings, and, of course, talking.
People, if you’ve never spent a Friday evening in a hotel bar hanging out with New York Times best-selling authors, a few absolutely on-fire rising Southern writers (Bobby Mathews and Mark Westmoreland), MFA students, editors—people with a passion for the word—while a whole-ass tornado lays its shadow on top of you, then you ain’t really lived. I highly recommend it.
You can’t be in Oxford without visiting either the home or the final resting place of William Faulkner. It’s might be cliche to discuss one person’s influence on not just a region but on an entire school of writing, but what Faulkner did to define the Southern voice—wrestling with the ghosts of race, history, and class—can’t be summed up easily, no matter how many writers have tried before. I sure as hell won’t try to do so here.
But his legacy lives as surely today as it ever has. Here was a writer who stripped bare the tree of the South and put it all on display with both beauty and monstrousness. What Faulkner did laid the road for the Southern writers who’ve followed him. We’re all in his debt.
Complete side note: Mark, Rob, Bobby, Eli and I were having breakfast Friday morning at the hotel restaurant and there wasn’t gravy on the menu, and then the sin was compounded when they ran out of biscuits . I’m not sure how something like this happens in Mississippi. I live in Kentucky, and gravy’s just assumed; I didn’t imagine there’d be a place where it wasn’t even an option. I’d thought you’d be able to get a bowl of it at the library.
WHAT I’M READING:
Mississippi goddamn but did I come back with a lot of books, most of them purchased at Square Books in Oxford. That’s gotta be one of the best book stores I’ve ever visited, and I only made it to the main building. My next trip down will require more exploring and undoubtedly more money.
Anyway, I started OZARK DOGS, Eli’s follow-up to his debut novel, DON’T KNOW TOUGH. Nearly halfway through and this brutal yet beautiful novel points toward being another triumph for Eli as storyteller and as a vital and important voice in crime fiction. Here he crafts a Greek tragedy through the scope of small towns, family, and the essential need folks often feel for revenge. It’s out tomorrow and I’d go order it if I was you.
That’s all we’ve got for now. Thanks for coming. See you next time, and hey, let’s be careful out there.
looks like a heck of a few days
No gravy?!