Reading Local

Roots & Rabbis

Eat local. You can't escape this directive these days, it's there on the screen every time you turn on the internet. To that end there are farmers markets and dinner parties serving nothing but locally grown or butchered fare. The community at large is rallying around the agrarian community.

I've recently made the decision and a concerted effort to read local. Memphis is home to, or has given birth to, many fine writers. The land here seems almost as fertile for short stories, novels, essays and memoirs as it is for tomatoes, okra, radishes and melons. The literary community has roots that run deep in the Delta.

While at the beach last week, I finished "The Roots of the Olive Tree" by Courtney Miller Santo and immediately picked up "The Frozen Rabbi" by Steve Stern. Santo is an Oregon native now calling Memphis home while Stern is a Memphis native residing in upstate New York.

Both books are multigenerational with Santo's Anna Keller, the family matriarch, born in 1894, and Stern's Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr frozen in time in 1890. Both books are also steeped in secrets known and unknown. In "Roots of the Olive Tree," a geneticist comes to Hill  House, the family home set among olive groves in Kidron, California, to study the longevity of firstborn daughters, and clues and hints are gleaned from stories told and blood drawn. In "The Frozen Rabbi," the secrets hidden by Max Feinshmeker are kept under wraps - kept under layers of clothing - to keep him anonymous and alive; Shmerl Karp's equine lair is an intriguing laboratory of pulleys and cranks that will yield the mysteries held aloft.

Both books are also steeped in age - the age of the olive trees and women, the age of traditions and lore - yet driven by youth. When the youngest, Erin, shows up at Hill House unannounced and pregnant, the women of the family rally around her protectively even as family secrets seek to turn her world, and theirs, upside down. There are questions she wants resolved and chapters put to an end before her own child is born. And when the Rebbe ben Zephyr thaws after more than a century, it is 15-year-old Bernie Karp, a descendant of those entrusted with the safekeeping of the frozen tzaddik, who discovers him and introduces him to the present age, ways and culture.

Stern's book, while riddled with more Yiddish than drawl, is nonetheless colored by the South and with recognizable cultural and concrete landmarks to Memphians such as the Harahan Bridge, Pinch District, local newspaper and various city streets. Santo's book takes place almost entirely in the Pacific Northwest, yet its theme of family, storytelling and the tendency to come together over an item of food is instantly recognizable to all of us from the area. In fact, family is at the root of both novels and both storytellers are adept at bringing alive the individual characters and characteristics that detail each tribe as a whole.

Read local. There are nuances and details within these books and stories that one might only get from a local writer, whether they are in a manner of speaking, a reference to an obscure cultural icon, food or even weather pattern. They are details that will leave you nodding your head and whispering, "yes." Any bookstore in the area should have a section devoted to local writers, this is your farmers market. These books may not make up the bulk of your shopping list, but there should be one or two thrown in to add some homegrown flavor to your literary feast. Memphis is replete with good writers from fiction - Stern, Santo, Cary Holladay, Corey Mesler - to nonfiction - Kristen Iversen, G. Wayne Dowdy, Molly Crosby. And then, of course, there are those no longer with us - Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor and William Faulkner.

Buy their books, attend their readings, alert your friends both near and far of the tales they tell. These writers should be staples on anyone's shelf, for the health of our imagination and of our community.

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern
2010, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo
Available Aug. 2012, William Morrow

Read more about Santo here

Memphians

Earlier this year I had the privilege of being asked to contribute to a new book about some of the well-known, and lesser-known, personalities in our city. The book is called Memphians (Nautilus Publishing) and it is being launched this Thursday at Burke's Book Store.

It's a big, beautiful book at almost 250-pages with large photos and bios written on folks such as Shelby Foote, Isaac Hayes, Charlie Vergos, Clarence Saunders, Charles McVean, Jim Dickinson, Justin Timberlake, Furry Lewis and many, many more. There are those you'd expect to be in here, and some you might not have.

It was a lot of fun researching and writing these pieces, and fun working with the other writers and editors - Dan Conaway, David Tankersley, Dennis Phillippi, Richard Murff and Neil White. I hope you'll come out and join us all this Thursday at Burke's. We'll be there, as will a whole lot of other Memphians.

Thursday, November 10

5:30 p.m.

Burke's Book Store

936 South Cooper St. 

(in the heart of Cooper-Young)

"A Collection Large and Full of Treasures"

This is how freelancing works in this town:

I was working with photographer Justin Fox Burks on a job for the Memphis Flyer last January and he suggested I contact Rhodes College because they use freelancers for their magazine. I contacted my friend Stephanie Chockley who works at Rhodes and gave me the contact for Martha Shepard, who edits the magazine, and she said she'd be delighted to work with me. The first assignment offered was one on the college's acquisition of the Shelby Foote collection of papers, memorabilia, manuscripts, etc. This was perfect. I'm a Foote fan and, as I've written before, I used to sell him his pipe tobacco years ago. Martha put me in touch with C. Stuart Chapman, Rhodes alumnus and biographer of Foote, for a sidebar and as an invaluable resource himself.

And then yesterday that article went online and can be read right here.

As moves go, it wasn′t such a great distance. Only a little over two miles to be exact, from the study of a turreted, fairy-tale-like house on East Parkway to the Gothic, shady campus on North Parkway. Nevertheless, the acquisition by Rhodes College of the Shelby Foote Collection of writings, papers, hand-drawn maps, photos and memorabilia is such that it will take researchers and students on a journey through decades worth of history, stories and lessons.

It was a memorable experience to go to the Paul Barret Jr. library on the Rhodes campus and be able to hold a first edition of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and the hand-written manuscript for September September. The hand-drawn maps of Civil War battles and troop advancements were something I hadn't expected, and a treasure to see, a real insight into the way Foote worked. The same goes for the spiral notebook that held some notes and, for lack of a better word, doodles.

For anyone who appreciates literature and what goes into writing a novel (not to mention a 1.2-million word narrative trilogy), to stand in the hushed, paneled room of a library and hold such items is nothing less than spiritual. It was very much like being in church.

It was a pleasure to work on this story and with those at the college, and I wish to thank Martha Shepard, Justin Burks, Elizabeth Gates, Stephanie Chockley, Tim Huebner, Marshall Boswell, Ken Woodmansee and Stuart Chapman.