Once I had the chance to sit down with Looking Back Mississippi, I was delighted. My favorite history lesson so far is on Koscuisko, Mississippi–the town with the funny name that I think everyone knows the Mississippi pronunciation is a long way from accurate. Not being a native Mississippian, that’s about all I knew about the town.

Coming from a district in Polish Lithuania in the 1700s, Tadeusz Andrzei Bonawentura Kosciuszko’s (correctly pronounced Kosh-CHOOSH-ko) name was “Americanized” after living in Philadelphia for several years into its current pronunciation as we know it in Mississippi. But did you know that Tadeusz Kosciuszko was what we might call an overachiever?

Here are few of Koscuisko’s high points: he was a natural leader educated at a top military school in Warsaw during the 1700s; studied engineering and architecture in France; fell in love with one of his students and nearly was killed by her wealthy father; landed in America in 1776 and before long he had laid out defenses in Philadelphia; transformed the defenses at West Point into the “American Gibraltar”; used his pension to buy the freedom for as many slaves as possible. Kosciuiszko’s remarkable, “Brave and True” story, as Cooper titles it, goes on. What an honor it is to have part of his history in Mississippi.

Enjoy the rest of Kosciusko’s story at your leisure, reading through the rest of the stories and photographs in Looking Back Mississippi. The entire text is complimented by beautiful old postcards from the towns and places Cooper writes about. Cooper has an amazing collection of over 10,000 postcards of towns and places in pre-1920′s Mississippi.

The titles of each story may or may not have the name of the town in it. I was searching and searching to find the story about Kosciusko again after I read it the first time. The title “Brave and True” I could not remember. After reading several other stories, including stories about Corinth, Mize and the Citrus of the Gulf coast, I found that these vague titles encouraged me to read about places I was not naturally drawn to read. It was a pleasure. Though I am reluctant to say it yet, the holidays are coming. This book would make a lovely gift.

Join us on Tuesday, October 18th for a signing and reading with Forrest Lamar Cooper at 5:00 and 5:30.

Looking Back Mississippi is published by The University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

Did you know that there are over 1 million acres of federal land designated as six national forests in Mississippi? In these national forests, there are 276 miles of hiking trails and 21 developed campgrounds and picnic areas. Most of this land has been recovering since the 1930s after being stripped of all its virgin trees. It was “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” who replanted the trees and established recreational areas for us to enjoy.

Author Helen McGinnis has hiked nearly every trail she writes about in her book. Much of the writing makes you feel like you have your very own trail leader. She points you to places you have never heard of and provides interesting tidbits of history rarely told. For example, she points out the little known Old Trace Trail, a pleasant 3.5 mile walk, which is not marked on the official Natchez Trace Parkway map:

“It is the wildest trail along the Parkway–crossed by no roads and out of sight from vehicles. The spell is broken only at the northern end, where the Trace passes along the edge of a large recent clearcut on private land.”

All of these details, historical notes and trail maps will certainly whet your appetite for a hike in Mississippi, but I would urge you to have a state atlas handy to get the bigger picture as you prepare for your hike. It also may be helpful to contact the National Forest office in the area for the most up-to-date information.

The Book: Panther Tract is about efforts to control the population of the wild hog in Mississippi. Published by University Press of Mississippi, the photography is beautiful and the stories have been collected from boar hunters across Mississippi and beyond. Chef John Folse has also contributed his best recipes.

Visit with some of the many story contributors in full hunting attire, the owner of Panther Tract, Howard Brent (left), and the photographer Melody Golding.

Some of the diversions will include a movie, beer, maybe some music, two wild boar heads, and a few hard working hog dogs.

If you’re not familiar to the lifestyle of hunting, you might ask as Hank Burdine did in the introduction to Panther Tract:

“Why do we hunt the wild boar when we can go to Kroger and buy all the bacon and hams we want?”

Come on over this evening and get the stories! It all starts at 5:00.

Half of the homes featured in Journey are in Mississippi and one of these is the House of Light and Shadow in Jackson, Mississippi. Ken Tate elaborates on the architecture of this understated work:

“This is not one of those Southern houses with big columns that say ‘Come on in,’ over the door. You have to follow a circuitous path just to get to the front door.”

He also mentions the Argentinian writer Jean Luis Borges as an inspiration for this home:

“Borges’ writing is very non-linear and contrary to Western rational intelligence. He had a fine understanding of mystery, and he was also very sensual. His descriptions of quintessential Latin American spaces are exquisite.”

“‘It is lovely to live in the dark friendliness of covered entranceway, arbor, and wellhead.’ I thought of that line as I designed the ‘dark friendliness’ of the porch. The whole experience of walking through this house is a bit lit reading a Borges story. There is a narrative that unfolds as you move through the dark passages toward bright, wide open spaces where the soul expands, the mind breathes, and the senses take over or toward duskier ones, filled with contemplation and interior dialogue.”

Ellen has been in a couple of Tate’s homes in Jackson. She has this to say:

“In Ken Tate’s homes you truly feel like you are standing in something that is built to last, while not looking like a bunker. I once heard architecture described as the most logical form of art and I think Ken’s style is just that and more. It is logical, functional and beautiful. The trifecta if you will.”

I cannot resist concluding with Ken Tate’s closing excerpt from The House of Breath by William Goyen. I am afraid that Ken Tate’s book has an appeal to lovers of literature as well.

That people could come into the world

in a place they could not at first

even name and had never known before;

And that out of a nameless and unknown place

they could grow and move around in it

until its name they knew and called

with love, and called it home,

and put roots there and love others there;

so that whenever they left this place

they would sing homesick songs about it

and write poems of yearning for it . . .

and forever be returning to it or leaving it again!

Join us Saturday as Ken Tate signs A Classical Journey at 1:00.

Growing Up in Mississippi

In the foreword, Richard Ford writes of the difficulty in constructing a clear picture of what actually influenced an individual as we all “invent” influences to serve our own needs and desires: “How does influence work, when you get down to it? I’m not sure. But it rarely works as mechanistically as, say, a hammer ‘influencing’ a nail to penetrate a prime piece of pine planking. I sometimes think that Mississippi influenced me by so insisting that Mississippi was an influence that I ran away across many state lines just to prove that the accident of birth was not as powerful as my own private acts of choosing” (xii).

With this challenge of defining influence, the twenty-nine contributors earnestly set down their stories. While it has already been two years since the first publication of Growing Up in Mississippi, editors Judy H. Tucker and Charline R. McCord have given Mississippians a timeless collection of stories illustrating the wide range of talent and ability nurtured by our Mississippi landscapes.

Tucker and McCord’s latest collection is Christmas Memories from Mississippi. Christmas Stories from Mississippi is another collection which also makes a great gift.

The opening stories are a fictionalized reflection of Alice’s marriage to civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal. Even though the reflections are weighted with the heaviness of a broken heart, I admired this couple in Jackson, Mississippi, Alice teaching and writing, birthing and raising their only baby girl, Mel working late nights all across Mississippi to prosecute civil rights violations. Alice also worked for the Legal Defense Fund, documenting cases of blacks who had been evicted from their homes because they had tried to register to vote.

When I first read Alice Walker’s work in Austria, I never ever would have imagined that I would find myself living in Jackson, Mississippi–since at that time I had no connections in Jackson. It was some time after I moved here that I picked The Way Forward off the bookshelf and was amazed that this book and I were here.

Since then I have read Alice Walker’s biography and was saddened to read the details of how Alice was unhappy and often felt her creativity to be stifled in Jackson. Obviously, she moved on as need be and has long felt Mississippi’s imprint.

Everybody’s talking about Lucas McCarty and the Trinity House of Prayer in Moorehead, Mississippi. The word is spreading because Mockingbird Publishing has teamed up with writer T. R. Pearson and photographer Langdon Clay.

The event has been making its way across Mississippi over the past couple of months–to Turnrow, to Squarebooks and finally to Lemuria on December 4th. As every other bookstore has said, I, too, say that this has to be one of the best events of the year and surely one of the most unique Lemuria has ever had.

The choir and band of Holy Trinity House of Prayer from Moorehead were gracious to travel to Jackson and share their good spirit along with Lucas, Bishop Knighten, and of course, writer and photographer T. R. Pearson and Langdon Clay. The Dot Com building was packed and no doubt that little green tin roof must have been thumping with the joyous singing.

Lucas McCarty with The Woods Family - One of the many beautiful photographs of Langdon Clay

Year of Our Lord is about so many things: the amazing journey of Lucas McCarty and his decision to join an all black church and leave behind his Episcopalian upbringing, a little church out in the Delta with no signage but a heart bigger than you can imagine. It is about hope and community and loving others just the way they are.

Watch this short video narrated by T. R. Pearson:

Here’s what one person from Alabama said about the event:

“Year of Our Lord is the story of Lucas and the community – black and white – that he has helped to create.  It is about looking for hope, not in Washington, as Bishop Knighten said so eloquently at the book signing on Saturday, but looking for it in the faces of those we live next to, go to school with, and worship with each Sunday.  Hope is each of ours to give.  It is the love we share with one another and in the humanity we display to our fellow man.”

“In that room in Jackson, Mississippi last Saturday night as we listened to the glorious voices of the Trinity choir, as we marveled at the coming together of people from every imaginable socio-economic range, as we clapped and sang and celebrated the young white man with cerebral palsy who brought us all together, I had hope.  Hope that we will see past the divisions that “they” keep telling us exist.  Hope that we will find our way out of the economic mess we are in.  Hope that people will continue to treat each other with dignity and humanity.  Hope that stories like these that we never hear about on the news or read about in the paper will continue to play out each and every day across America.  Because I believe that we are a nation of good people, generous people, caring people, kind people, even if “they” don’t want us to know about it or believe in it.”

I remember when the book came into Lemuria. I thought that Year of Our Lord must be a really special even though I had not yet had time to sit down and read it. Now, this one is top on my Christmas list.

Mockingbird Publishing partners with non-for-profit organizations on every book. A portion of the proceeds from Year of Our Lord will be donated to support the outreach programs of the Trinity House of Prayer and a foundation for Lucas McCarty. It’s available for purchase here.

You can also find Mockingbird and Year of Our Lord on Facebook.

1. Who was the most reluctant famous Mississippian to be profiled (hint: this Mississippian owns all of his or her own photos — and didn’t want to give us permission to publish his or her likeness)?

2. What was the most expensive photograph to acquire for publication?

3. Who is the relatively unknown Mississippian who was the force behind Die Hard, 48 Hours, Predator, Point Break and Field of Dreams?

4. Who was the fastest man to ever play baseball – a name, perhaps, one we’ve never before heard?

5. What Mississippian sent comic skits scribbled on notebook paper to Saturday Night Live – and soon became head writer for the show?

6. What Mississippian has the largest collection of first-edition magazines in the world?

7. What Mississippians has one of the largest collections of blues photography in the world – and is one of the few non-musicians to be inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame?

8. What Mississippian was the first female African American postmaster in the U.S?

9. What Mississippian is the only American to live – with permission – in North Korea?

10. What Mississippian heads a company that will change the way Americans use electricity?

11. What African-American Mississippian was responsible for the Teddy Bear craze?

12. What Mississippian received the most nominations (this person is not featured in the book).

13. Who has been nominated for next year’s edition?

14. Who was intentionally left out of the 2010 edition?

Tonight at Lemuria Books, find the answers to these questions – and more!

Also, meet editor Neil White, as well as the Mississippians listed below (all are happy to inscribe for Christmas gifts):

1. Gary Grubbs, one of film and television’s most recognizable character actors.

2. John Maxwell, award-winning actor and playwright.

3. Martha Bergmark, found of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a group that is changing the legal landscape of Mississippi.

4. William Goodman, emerging visual artist

5. Mike and Cathy Stewart, America’s top dog trainers and breeders (their dogs sell for $12,000 each)

6. Howard Bahr, award-winning author.

Then I saw the dogs, dogs standing at attention next to a handsome, outdoorsy looking fellow named Mike Stewart, owner and trainer at Wildrose Kennels right up in old Oxpatch, 143 acres of field just for training and housing English labs whose genetic make up comes from dogs with such regal sounding homes as Queensbury Estate in Scotland and Arley Hall Estates in England.

Ranked by Forbes magazine (April 2009, complete with pictures of Mike and labs) as one of the best recession proof businesses in the USA, Wildrose Kennels specializes in training labs to do just about anything you can imagine and more. One of the newer programs is training in diabetic alert.

These dogs are taught to retrieve, to hunt, to play, to obey. They can even major in adventure. Lucky dogs. Rather expensive dogs, ($1,500 for a pup, $15,000 for a fully trained adult), Mike says the dogs don’t cost as much as a big fine car which you swap out every four years or so. These dogs are now living all over the world and people fly in from near and far to be a part of the training and purchasing of these fine working and companion dogs.

Mr. Stewart was Ole Miss Chief of Police from 1981-2000 and equates training dogs with keeping students well behaved at the University, quipping that dogs and college kids both need consistency and repetition to be good citizens.

Character wise, I will say this fella is way up there. Who, owning kennels in Oxford, Arkansas and Colorado, has time to call an admiring, blogging bookseller in Jackson, MS for an inteview over the phone? He does. And he’s prompt. He even invited me up to train any shelter puppy from my own copious list on www.sitstay.petfinder.com. Lucky me. Thanks, Neil White, for introducing me to this hospitable, gentlemanly entrepreneur whose passion for dogs equals my own and many others in this gone-to-the-dogs world.

-Pat