progress report

I looked up from work this morning and decided to grab my camera. This is what it's like to be deeply-dug-in with book two of the sixties trilogy this week. 1964. Freedom Summer.

Back to it.

loving what you've got

The culminating event of last month's travels -- and the reason we planned a Mississippi trip in the first place -- was a family gathering to mark the occasion of my cousin Carol's retirement from teaching. 

Carol taught second grade for 29 years, and then became a librarian for another dozen. Any way you slice it, that's a lot of years in the classroom, and a lot of lives touched by an extraordinary teacher. I made the cake.

Everyone pitched in to make a marvelous meal, kinfolks arrived, and, once again, generations came together, the way we do.

Pass the babies, exclaim over the children, enthuse about the meal, praise the cooks, recall family history, get a staircase photo with the lingerers, take a picture of the three Jims together, play a little jazz for the youngest aficionado, catch up and lift up: we choose one another, even in all our quirks and differences. We appreciate one another. It makes the loving world go 'round.

And that's a good thing. It's what I write about as well: Families that see beyond a lifetime's disappointments and shortcomings and expectations and pain, people who, in the end, swallow their pride and see themselves -- and others -- for what they are... beautiful, fallible human beings... and embrace what's joyful, what's funny, what's delightful, what's lovable -- because there is so, so much that is lovable.

It's a right-of-passage to come to this place in life. It's the jackpot, if you're lucky. It teaches you to love yourself.

This particular right-of-passage is a theme of all my fiction. The story may wrap around 1964 Mississippi, but at its heart, book two is a story of loving what you've got. Who you've got. And seeing that it is good.

time to cook the kale

Maybe I got over-enthusiastic about the kale at the farmer's market last week. I've had my head so far down in 1964, I haven't cooked much the past couple of weeks except for Sunday dinners. Now it's time to cook (or massage, or juice, or etc) the kale.

I've still got a ways to go. But I'm making a dent. Kinda how I feel about the novel right now. Happy Weekend! Eat your kale.

sunny's world

Pictures today from our research trip in May. Jim reading at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi; napping at Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford; traveling the back roads into the Delta, the roads Sunny would know in book two; Bryant's Store in Money (just outside of Greenwood); and Shellmound Plantation, the setting for Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding.

We spent two days in Greenwood with our guides. We soaked it up. We visited our friends at Turnrow Books. I sat and imagined this town in 1964, listened to the stories, and imagined Sunny in the middle of it all, which is where I've put her in book two.

This is my third research trip to Greenwood, and I'm finally beginning to feel like I know the place just a little bit. Sometimes it just takes time.  This is the first book I've written about a place I didn't live in myself.

Even though I did a lot of growing up in Mississippi, my homeplace was three hours south of Greenwood. In some ways it was exactly the same. In others, it may as well have been a different planet.

But it's not a different planet. It's a different character.