Tag Archives: jesmyn ward

Reading List (2019)

Posted on December 16, 2019 | 1 comment

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“I guess there are never enough books.” – John Steinbeck

I am happy to report that I read twenty-five books for the third year in a row in spite of a crazy cross-country move. I have every intention of keeping up this particular discipline as the 2020s roll in. Here are a few observations from 2019:

#1: Five of the books were authored by friends: I sure have talented friends.
#2: It feels like Reimagining the Student Experience: Formative Practices for Changing Times was written just for my new job.
#3: I’m still enamored with Jesmyn Ward but am embarrassed that it took me this long to read beautiful novels from literary giants like James Baldwin, James Joyce, and Toni Morrison.
#4: Educated by Tara Westover blew my mind
#5: All in all, The Children by David Halberstam was my Book of the Year.

Here is my overall list for 2019:

Novels (6 this year—6 in 2018, 3 in 2017)
* Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
* Bowling Avenue by Ann Shayne
* Your Killin’ Heart by Peggy O’Neal Peden
* Dubliners by James Joyce
* Sula by Toni Morrison
* Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Books written by friends (5 this year—1 in 2018, 6 in 2017)
* White Jesus: The Architecture of Racism in Religion and Education by Allison Ash; Christopher Collins; Tabatha Jones Jolivet; and Alexander Jun
* Kingdom Come by John Mark Hicks & Bobby Valentine
* Colonel Jonathan: An American Story by John Francis Wilson
* Ten Frames at the Galaxy Bowl by Kyle Dickerson
* Letterville: The Town That God Built by Aaron Sain

Theology/Church (4 this year—8 in 2018, 6 in 2017)
* Conversations with Will D. Campbell, edited by Tom Royals
* Homosexuality and the Christian by Mark A. Yarhouse
* (Re-read) Falling Upward by Richard Rohr
* (Re-read) Law and the Bible: Justice, Mercy, and Legal Institutions, edited by Robert F. Cochran, Jr. and David VanDrunen

Leadership/Politics/Sociology (3 this year—0 in 2018, 0 in 2017)
* Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele
* Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl
* Dare to Lead by Brene Brown

Biography/Memoir (2 this year—3 in 2018, 5 in 2017)
* Educated by Tara Westover
* Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash

Education (2 this year—0 in 2018, 0 in 2017)
* Roaring Lambs: A Gentle Plan to Radically Change Your World by Bob Briner
* Reimagining the Student Experience: Formative Practices for Changing Times, edited by Brian Jensen and Sarah Visser

History (2 this year—1 in 2018, 1 in 2017)
* How Nashville Became Music City U.S.A.: 50 Years of Music Row by Michael Kosser
* The Children by David Halberstam

Poetry/Essays (1 this year—1 in 2018, 1 in 2017)
* The Farm by Wendell Berry

Sports (0 this year—3 in 2018, 3 in 2017)
Writing (0 this year—1 in 2018, 0 in 2017)
Crime (0 this year—1 in 2018, 0 in 2017)

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The University of… “The South”

Posted on August 5, 2019 | Leave a comment
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Sewanee, Tennessee (and it was not easy to get that butterfly to hold its pose!)

The University of the South is an actual place in Tennessee, although its oft-noted resemblance to Hogwarts might make one wonder. It is officially Sewanee: The University of the South, and the combination of its mountaintop location and Gothic architecture is crazy cool, but that’s not what I am referring to today.

Instead, I am thinking about my education in “The South.” I was born and raised in, shaped and influenced by, and commissioned to leave from and welcomed to return to The South. It is once again both my heritage and mailing address.

I do not have a romanticized vision of The South, though tempting at times, but neither do I focus only on its shameful parts. I attempt instead to see it as it is, warts and all (which is surprisingly not an original Southern phrase!).

None of this is specific to The South. Every place can be both resplendent and repulsive if you look from just the right angle. What makes The South special to me is that it is mine.

If put to an answer for my favorite novelist, I would go with Jesmyn Ward, who has been compared to William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. I am a white man, and Ward is a black woman, so although we grew up in the same region, we grew up in different worlds. Ward matriculated to Stanford University and later the University of Michigan and went on to wild success as a novelist. She could live and work anywhere in the world, but with mixed feelings she chose to return home to The South. Last summer she answered the question why in an essay for TIME magazine. She described her dilemma and then, in her own beautiful way, shared that she, too, has a dream:

I like to imagine that one day, I will build a home of cement, a home built to weather the elements, in a clearing in a piney Southern wood, riven with oak and dogwood. I’d like a small garden where I could grow yellow squash and bell peppers in the summer, collards and carrots in the winter, and perhaps keep a few chickens. I wish for one or two kind neighbors who will return my headstrong bulldog if she wanders off, neighbors who I can gift a gallon of water in the aftermath of a hurricane. I like to think that after I die, my children will look at that place and see a place of refuge, of rest. I hope they do not flee. I hope that at least one of them will want to remain here in this place that I love more than I loathe, and I hope the work that I have done to make Mississippi a place worth living is enough. I hope they feel more themselves in this place than any other in the world, and that if they do leave, they dream of that house, that clearing, those woods, when they sleep.

I have received many lessons in the university of “The South” and have apparently returned to continue my education.

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As I Sit Writing

Posted on April 30, 2018 | 4 comments

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It is kind of cool to say that I read Jesmyn Ward before reading William Faulkner, but as a former Mississippian it felt wrong never to have read Faulkner so I purchased As I Lay Dying and devoured it while strapped to an airplane on a recent business trip. Faulkner is a legend, of course, especially so in Mississippi what with his Nobel and multiple Pulitzers and all.

As I Lay Dying is probably Faulkner’s runner-up to The Sound and the Fury for his best-known novel and is most assuredly a depressing story. The pitiful Bundren family’s sad series of misadventures attempting to bury the family matriarch is, well, pity-full, but instead of proceeding straight to therapy upon completing the book I found myself reflecting on Faulkner’s style.

If you remember (and/or care), Faulkner used fifteen different narrators for fifty-nine tiny chapters and a stream of consciousness literary technique that shared the disparate thoughts passing through the minds of his grieving characters. As he did, I found myself noticing and relating to their obvious loneliness, their feelings of detachment from everyone else. Each was so very alone. Alone with his or her thoughts.

I surely get how that feels.

There are many odd things about me, but the one I will share today boys and girls is that for some undetermined reason in my loneliness I regularly write down my inner monologue and share it with the world at large. That is odd, best I can tell. Most people learn to keep their thoughts to themselves, but I presumably was absent that day.

Maybe it is my own meager attempt to defeat loneliness. Or maybe loneliness has liberated me so that I am unafraid to share my inner thoughts.  Or maybe I am just weird. All are valid options.

Regardless, it is what I do, for what it is worth. Welcome to my world. Pull up a chair and stay awhile if you have nothing better to do.

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Make Them Know

Posted on August 29, 2016 | 2 comments

“Make them know.”

In Jesmyn Ward’s award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, Skeetah, a poor Mississippi teenage boy whispered that phrase to his treasured pit bull, China, before sending her into battle against her nemesis, Kilo.  I found it to be the most gripping line in a terrific book.

Salvage the Bones is a fierce story of a poor family as told through the eyes of a teenage girl, motherless, surrounded by men and boys, secretly pregnant, and trying to understand life as Hurricane Katrina warms up, bears down, and then inundates their world.  Among many compelling topics the novel explores is the idea of invisibility, which is where the phrase “make them know” leapt off the page and demanded my attention.  Unnoticed, overlooked, neglected—those are not good words, and undeniably not a good feeling.

My little family of four lost our home eleven years ago today in Hurricane Katrina, and although we surprisingly have fond memories of that great national tragedy due to a heightened sense of community and the opportunity to meet great-hearted strangers full of love, the raging waters surely had some of our tears sprinkled in.  And, to be honest, from time to time, a little bit of spit in it projected in anger toward institutions including but not limited to governments and insurance companies, pardon the legalese.

And I’ll tell you, if you ever want to get punched by someone from Mississippi (and who doesn’t?), then say that you thought Hurricane Katrina was just in New Orleans.  Please know that it wasn’t.

Make them know.

When you mix marginalization and anger and leave it in the microwave too long, you start to hear those words building in your heart.  And more often than not, they emerge violently.

So why does my family have fond memories of a tragedy in our lives?  Despite the infuriating institutions that failed us?  Despite the relatively speaking inordinate attention our New Orleans neighbors received?  It is because we were loved.  We were known.

In this tragic world of ours, where the recipe for violence is constantly prepared in the kitchen, the best advice I can offer is to be about the work of making others known.  Expecting others to do it themselves is not healthy for anyone.

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