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You’ll Always Be Welcome: Celebrating Lemuria Bookstore’s 48 Years with Founder John Evans

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Gerry Wilson interviews John Evans, the founder/owner of Lemuria Books

The façade of Lemuria Books would be impressive anywhere, but in Jackson, Mississippi, Lemuria’s doors represent the entrance to a long literary tradition. Lemuria’s founder and owner, John Evans, has a story to tell about the sculpture of a “book in hand” over the front doors.

He reminds me that Lemuria spent the early years (I was a customer even then) in a closet-size space in The Quarter, a small shopping center located on the outskirts of Jackson, and in Highland Village, which was a step-up location-wise, but it wasn’t John’s dream store. Lemuria moved to its present location, Banner Hall, in 1988. In the course of that move, John says, he immersed himself in design books and books about bookstores. He became enamored of Irish book shops and diners with unique entrances (think: a donut shop whose entry is a donut hole, or the old A&W root beer chain). Lemuria was settling in at the new location when the eBook craze began and threatened to take down physical book stores everywhere. That was when John settled on the symbol of the “book in hand” that would represent what was and is, for John and for readers, the essence of Lemuria. A design firm in New Orleans created the “sculpture.” Mounted over the front doors, the piece looks like a bronze, but to quote John, “If it were, you’d need a fortress to hold it up!” It’s striking just the same and speaks for Lemuria very well.

John will tell you that, even though much has changed over the years, Lemuria is the same warm place it was when the store first opened in 1975. The interior will remind you of someone’s lovely, dark-paneled home library. The staff are happy to help and/or make recommendations, but they won’t follow you around. You’re free to wander from room to room where the shelves are clearly defined for content.

There’s the “Mississippi corner,” where Lemuria celebrates Mississippi’s literary chops with unabashed pride. I’m happy to have one book on those shelves already, and That Pinson Girl will be there soon, alongside all the “Mississippi greats” I so admire. There’s as fine a selection of poetry books as you’ll find anywhere. Looking for travel or food or nonfiction? Lemuria has them all. There’s a children’s and youth shop, too—OZ, a magical little place. Lemuria boasts all the accoutrements of a “good” book store space but goes one better. The First Editions Room houses an exceptional collection of books you may not find elsewhere, especially the classic, collectible Mississippi authors—William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ellen Douglas, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris—as well as the newer generations of writers: John Grisham, Richard Ford, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, Katy Simpson Smith, and many, many more. The Mississippi literary tradition lives on.

The photos I’ve included give you a taste of Lemuria, but they can’t tell the whole story. Only John Evans can do that.

He and I got together a while back. In the interview you may be struck, as I was, by his breadth of knowledge and his love for what he’s been doing all these years.

Here’s John:

GERRY: Lemuria’s website tells us, “In 1975, John Evans opened Lemuria in a converted apartment stuffed full of books in The Quarter in Jackson, Mississippi.” In 2025, Lemuria turns 50! To what do you attribute Lemuria’s longevity?

JOHN: Lemuria has many loyal writers, but we’ve maintained a malleable business plan that adapts as the industry changes. For the last 40 years, the industry has often been on a rollercoaster. We’re going through another period like that now. But Lemuria has maintained the loyalty of our readers and has been able to adapt to change.

GERRY: Lemuria has a very active visiting author schedule. Why do you think it’s important to provide the space where authors and readers come together?

JOHN: The answer goes back to when we [Lemuria] first began in the Quarter. A poet, Terry Hummer, came to me and wanted to do poetry readings in the book store. So we started having some poets come and read. The author list grew when the store moved [to Highland Village] around 1977-78. That’s when we met Ellen Gilchrist, we met Barry Hannah, we met Willie Morris, and we began to realize that writers being friends with the store made the books come alive and become more than a product. When books come alive, readers care more about them. It creates a more vibrant experience.

Also it’s fun! I didn’t realize when I started, but the ability to develop long-term friendships with writers has been a gift to my life. I’m not just somebody selling their books. They respect my work as I respect theirs.

So many writers who were great friends of Lemuria are gone. We can’t talk about the book store without talking about Miss [Eudora] Welty. What a gift. She shared so many of her friends [with the store]—like Walker Percy. Those friendships full of integrity and association wouldn’t have happened without her. John Grisham is another writer who has allowed the book store to stay out of debt!

GERRY: How do you want your customers to feel when they walk into the store?

JOHN: Relaxed! If they’re relaxed, they’re comfortable to explore. I’m a believer that books find you; you don’t just find them. Being a browser is like being a prospector; you’re trying to mine something that gives you something that’s unexpected, that makes it a special experience.

GERRY: What are the greatest challenges facing book store owners today? How do you address them?

JOHN: I think the most important thing today is to figure out how to maintain your upstream identity to the publishers and the value you bring to them. In 2020 the trade show was cancelled. That was where I went with staff, made the one-on-one contacts, discovered what books fit for us, what authors to befriend and/or bring to Jackson. I worked with Richard [Howorth] at Square Books in Oxford to “put Mississippi on the map.”

But so many people [in the book industry] quit because of Covid. It’s been difficult working with new people, but we have done a pretty good job. My young [staff] people are talking to their young people. But how do people perceive your authenticity when you’re doing everything by email or digitally? Online ordering became very important during the pandemic. We haven’t quite recovered from all that yet. It’s hard to explain what you think you mean to the community when someone doesn’t come in and see for himself. Ordering online has changed the dynamic.

GERRY: What do you want Lemuria’s legacy to be?

JOHN: I don’t know. I guess what legacy means is when you think about someone, what do you think about? “Well, you know, he shared this great book with me. That was his gift to me.” The connection is the book, the reading experience. And the reading experience is our own little creative art form we practice ourselves, what we’re reading and thinking about.

Also, it’s rewarding to have the third generation of families coming in the store. That makes me realize I haven’t wasted my life! Something’s being done right. That’s real.

As we were closing the conversation, John asked me a question. “You go all the way back to the Quarter,” he said. (I do indeed!) “Do you think the bookstore has maintained its essence?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, and then some.” And the three generations of readers who have now walked through Lemuria’s doors would agree.

If you read the news, no doubt you know that my home town, Jackson, has more than its share of problems. But no matter how often we deal with crumbling infrastructure or water woes, Lemuria stands quite literally “on a hill,” bringing the best of a broad range of reading pleasures to the community. If you’re ever near Jackson or willing to drive a little bit out of your way—then please: “Y’all come,” as my aunt used to call out from her porch as my parents and I drove away on Sunday afternoons. You’ll always be welcome. And if you can’t get to Jackson, do the next best thing: go online and pay Lemuria Books a visit.

Lemuria Books will host the reading/signing launch party for Gerry Wilson’s That Pinson Girl (available February 6, 2024) on March 7, 2024. 

Gerry Wilson is the author of Crosscurrents and Other Stories, published by Press 53, and a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award Nominee in 2016. An early draft of That Pinson Girl (coming from Regal House in 2024) was a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition. Residing in Jackson, Mississippi, Gerry is the recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship.

Learning the New House

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by Tim J. Myers

You move into a new house, and of course it’s a hell of a lot of work.  We’ve been pulling fourteen-hour days, hauling boxes till our arms and legs ache.  And you start setting things up, just so.  This goes here—should we put that over there?  A seemingly endless number of objects to be placed, to be positioned as the perfect slaves they are, never moving unless we bid them.  And you start learning the little peculiarities of the place—the way you have to pull just so to get the shower to work—how the front door sticks a bit.  Even the sounds of it, a kind of minor encyclopedia:  the kitchen tile you keep stepping on, that makes an odd squelching noise—the way china rattles in the hutch when someone walks past.

But all along you’re engaged in another kind of house-warming too, almost without thinking.  You hardly notice it.  And it’s more than one’s emotional attachment to a house, as real as that is.  It’s something that takes no notice of the elements of “home staging,” like the smell of fresh-baked bread to entice renters or buyers, or general “home-i-ness,” any of that.  You’re seeking, feeling for, slipping into, something far deeper.

I worried for days, unaware of it, that there were no mockingbirds here.  So many in our old neighborhood—and just three miles away!  The world alive with them in May and June, their songs filling me whether I listened or not.  Then I heard one, here, from the branches of the Modesto ash in our front yard.  Fool, I told myself—you just happened to move in early July, the season shifts, they stop singing then.  Mates are already won, sex on hidden branches has filled the world with a different, silent kind of song—eggs are growing in feathered bodies, nests being built.  They’re here too.  Of course.

We think about shower curtains, where to hang the mirrors, how to pack our plastic Christmas bins in the little shed.  I try to remember how to reconnect all the parts of my computer.  I go out to the car at night, off to grab some fast food, and notice a gleam of stars through leaf-thick branches above me.

We talk continually about what we need to buy.  A new rug for the dining room—what color?  Indoor-outdoor is best—they wear better, and easier to clean.  At night I fall into bed, my head as weary as my body.  But I find myself waking to sunlight crowding at the window, warming my limbs.  Ah, the window looks east—it can be for us like it was for those who lived here long ago, homes arranged so their doorways always faced the dawn.

And my neighbor, whose backyard is a botanical version of a middle-class pleasure palace, a Cheesecake Factory of greenery and garden knick-knacks—he tells me off-handedly that he gets hummingbirds all the time.  That eases me—eases this part of my self that’s learning the new house, the new street, the new bit of Earth beneath it.  Eases the part of me that fears a particular kind of emptiness amid the great but level fruitfulness of a modern American suburb.

The flurry of questions continues:  Where’s the closest grocery store?  How long will it take us to get to work from here?  Oh, you can’t go that way—that’s our old route, it’ll take too long.  But under those questions, a quieter one, less pressing in the practical world, far more pressing in the depths of myself:

What capacity does this new place have?

The question keeps rising in wordless form; I realize with only mild surprise that I myself am asking it, again and again.  And I know, without thinking, exactly what it means.

Capacity—for Vision.  For some strange sudden eruption of spiritual truth into my consciousness.  How will I encounter the sacred in the minutiae and particulars of this one small place?  What relationship may arise between my spirit and the sidewalks, the front lawn, the feel of the house at midnight?  It’s happened before—Vision has come to me, changing everything.  Can it happen here?

In the middle of our big moving day, sweating and dirt-smudged, she and I paused at twilight to glimpse the new crescent through vines and trees in the backyard.  Nothing made us feel more at home.

I took all the power strips and extension cords, cleaned them up, rolled and rubber-banded them, put them in a drawer so we can find them when we need them.  The cable guy came and connected us.  There’s an enormous deciduous, huge rounded leaf-heavy crown, off beyond the houses across the street.  It must be on the next block, maybe farther.  I step out the side door of the garage to finish a drink, find myself peering beyond the top of my new fence to those high branches as they shift in the wind—

Yes, I think.  Yes.  The way those leaves move, the sway of those branches in wind just after the sun sets.  Yes.

It can happen here.

My spirit begins to take its ease.  It has its own great animal faith in eventuality, even concerning that which seems, by its very radiance, impossible.  And now it feels this place, begins to let itself seep into everything here, the slope of the roof, the dirt of the empty flowerbeds, the worn wood of the back fence, the stuccoed walls, each blade of newly-sodded grass.  It greets passing breezes, neighborhood smells, little rainbows in the sprinkler arcs.

I begin to wait.

Regal House poet Tim J. Myers

Tim J. Myers is a writer, storyteller, songwriter, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University.  He writes for all ages.  Find him at www.TimMyersStorySong.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TimJMyers1.  Regal House is proud to publish Tim J. Myers’ poetry collection, Down in the White of the Tree:  Spiritual Poems in the fall of 2018.

 

Learning a New House,” was originally published in: America:  The National Catholic Review. 2017, with the title: “Looking for God while moving into a new house that doesn’t feel like home.”

Writing In New York – Part I

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by Nora Shychuk

Like so many others, I had moved to New York City with a dream to write, to be at the center of things and pay attention. But such a reality, even in the service of a great dream, is a hard and often lonely one. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy move to make, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t harder than I guessed it would be. I was out of my element and struggling to find my place. I knew very few people. To say that I was overwhelmed and scared on a daily basis would be an understatement.

I remember, just twenty-four hours before, feeling completely exposed walking through Times Square. Peddlers tried to sell me tickets to comedy shows and shoved CDs in my hands. The rumble of the subway underneath my feet was jolting, the perpetual traffic and honking became its own temperamental rhythm. I felt as if I was on another planet.

But the West Village is, comparatively, quiet. It was an early October afternoon. The sun shined, the blue sky above was soft and cloudless.  As I walked, people were few and far between.  I could hear my footsteps and birds in the trees. Colorful leaves blew across the cozy streets, drawing my eyes to the red brick buildings as I made my way to Bank Street.

I had an appointment. I was set to interview Carol Hebald, author of the novel A Warsaw Chronicle. We had exchanged e-mails for months, setting up a time and place to meet to discuss her new book. As a young, emerging writer just having arrived in the cultural, literary hub of the world, the chance to sit down with a seasoned writer and lifelong New Yorker struck me as a great professional opportunity.

And I suppose it was. But it was so much more than that.

When I arrived, Carol had food ready and waiting on the table. After a warm welcome, she asked if I’d like coffee, tea, or wine. Having to work later that afternoon, I passed on the wine and opted for coffee. While she got it ready, we talked about New York and my recent year and a half abroad in Ireland where I earned my graduate degree.

“Do you miss it?” she asked me.

She smiled easily and when I spoke her eye contact was unwavering. She was a woman – and writer – who knew how to listen. I felt at home immediately.

“Yes,” I said. “I really do.”

When my coffee was ready, I walked it to the living room where Carol and I both sat down on her couch at opposite ends.

A Warsaw Chronicle follows Karolina Heybald, an American exchange professor teaching at Warsaw University during the inception of martial law in 1981. Always present in the novel is the conflict between the Communist party and the Solidarity movement.  Karolina finds herself in the midst of political turmoil as she tries to find a missing cousin. Everywhere she looks, there is danger, real and unavoidable.

Carol and I started the interview by looking back. Amazingly, A Warsaw Chronicle was inspired by very true events. From 1981 to 1982, Carol was the visiting American exchange professor at Warsaw University in Poland. She had just received tenure as an associate professor at the University of Kansas but jumped at the opportunity to go abroad.

She explained that at the time, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain. Politically, it was divisive and violent. Many people asked her why she’d ever want to travel to Warsaw. She was doing well professionally. Didn’t she know the risks? But her reasons were never professional. They were personal and close to the heart.

Her father was born in Krakow and died when Carol was only four. To go to the country where he was born presented her with an opportunity for closure. Not to mention, she saw it as an opportunity to challenge herself.

“I was very naïve in many, many ways,” Carol told me. “Two classes and a handful of students in each. I’d have a world of time to write, I thought, [but] I was in something of a shock when I got there.”

When she arrived in Warsaw, it was sunny and clear. “People looked at me as though I was crazy because they were having such a difficult time,” she said. “It was only two or three months before martial law was declared and I didn’t realize what was happening politically. They kept saying, ‘why did you come here? Why did you come here? Nobody wants to come here.’”

She recalled waiting in long lines for food and how there was never enough to eat. She went hungry herself, a feature common in A Warsaw Chronicle.

Some of the characters in the novel are drawn from life. Karolina’s tutor, for example, is real. When Carol arrived in Warsaw she met him immediately. The two are still in touch today.

Another driving force in A Warsaw Chronicle is Marek, Karolina’s star pupil who dreams of becoming a poet. Their connection entangles Karolina in a high-stakes conflict concerning Marek’s fate. The relationship between the two is fully formed, fully realized. But, Carol told me, Marek is complete fiction.

“I shouldn’t say complete,” she clarified. “There was a meeting somewhere around November right before martial law was declared when a student raised his hand and asked a question I remember having at his age. [He asked] about great work. Does it come from a great idleness or does it come from an enormous amount of work. Which was true? And I just remembered that I had asked that question myself. I looked at him and his face remained in my mind. I never saw him again, but he became Marek.”

Carol went on to say that she felt the closest to Marek, that his character was the most her. He developed organically, as all her characters do. Instead of planning and plotting, Carol allows the moving pieces and voices of her novels to develop naturally, to come to her when the time is right. “[Marek] became a character who was very much alive. And my part was already there. And then I created the father. I don’t know from where. I didn’t consciously sit down and decide to write what I wrote.”

The father, first Lieutenant Maciesz, is a ruthless presence in A Warsaw Chronicle. But, Carol said, he’s a part of her, too. “They come out of me. The father. His cruelty, his bitterness, the fault in his thinking that because he has suffered so much, he knows more.”

The novel developed from old journal entries Carol wrote during her time abroad. Every day, she was chronicling observations about life in Poland. “I simply made diary entries every day and the story took off on its own.”

I told Carol I worked much the same way, going off of notes, feelings, and observations rather than outlining down to the very last detail. I told her I barely ever made a conscious decision in terms of pace or what’s best, practically, for plot. Instead, I go with my gut and allow a certain emotional tug to sway me.  I let the ideas grow as I work.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to listen. You have to have the confidence. If someone tells me, for example, in the writer’s group, that they lost interest in a certain moment, I’d be interested in that because there is, in a novel, necessary places where you want to insert certain information and want the reader to be bored. You don’t want to get rid of too much of [the reader’s] energy. You’re writing and listening at the same time and you’re saying ‘I’ve had enough of this and want to get back to the action.’”

And only the writer knows their characters and how they must navigate through life as the story develops. For Carol, it can’t be all gunfights and obsessive love triangles. Writing is about life, and that includes the mundane, the slow, quiet moments of the every day. “Deep down,” she said, “you know when a moment should drag. It lets the reader rest so they have the energy to feel more when the next crisis comes along.”

It was easy to talk about the process of writing with Carol, about the importance of feeling a story and understanding our characters and where they come from. Personal experience always helps, too. For her, A Warsaw Chronicle was always waiting to be told. It formed from isolation and the reality of displacement. “It was the loneliness that I felt,” she said. “There was very little teaching that went on there. It was mostly waiting in line for food. It was mostly waiting for the day to end.”

But she remembered her time in Kansas and knew that her reason to leave was warranted. “It certainly didn’t do me any good professionally, but Kansas was more of a foreign country to me than Warsaw could ever be. I was a lot lonelier in Kansas than I was in Warsaw. I’m from New York City. Born and bred. And Warsaw was another city, at least. And my father was from there; I wanted to explore where he lived. I wanted to forget him – that was the central thing in my life because he was so much a part of me.”

At this point in our conversation, Carol stopped and looked far off. I followed her line of sight. She was looking out the window, at the streams of autumnal light. Whatever she said next would be carefully considered. She took a deep breath.

“This is hard to explain,” she said. “He was on my mind all the time. He died when I was four years old. And I wanted that to end. I thought if I went I could put it all behind me and just get on with my life as a woman, you know? I was nearly 50 at the time.”

I spoke openly about my own readiness to go abroad to Ireland two years prior. Of course, Ireland was much safer and free of any comparable political upheaval, but it was still a drastic move that few people I knew had ever taken. I wanted to get out of Florida and away from the people I never understood. I told Carol that, quite similarly, I felt the need to leave in order to understand something larger. I moved four-thousand miles away and felt immediately more rooted. I felt like a better version of myself.

I spoke of my own mother next. She died of lung cancer when I was ten. Carol’s father had also died of cancer. We both knew the pain of untimely death, of lives cut short. When such a loss disrupts your life, it’s not hard to understand the simple but heartbreaking fact that life doesn’t last forever. We’re not guaranteed long, happy existences. It was clear to both of us, in the quiet way in which we remembered them, that our parents passing away triggered something in us: the need to make our days count.

Nora Shychuk, Pact Press contributor
Nora Shychuk

“My mom is in everything I write,” I told Carol. “It’s interesting, the loss of a parent.  There’s so much you don’t know, but it still impacts so much of what you do.”

“Everything,” she said. “When I was three I was alone in the house with him. My mother took over the store, my sister was in school. There was a nurse taking care of me, but we were alone for an entire year. My dad and I. And even though I don’t know remember all the details of that year, it’s a central part of my life. I remember, shortly before he died, I asked my father what I should be when I grow up. He told me to be somebody.”

In 1984, after she returned from Poland, Carol resigned her tenure and moved back to New York City to write full-time. I told her that a lot of people would consider such a move reckless, to give up comfort for a life of instability and uncertainty. But Carol knew what it was like to struggle and scrape by. Poland proved that to her. She wasn’t afraid of being poor or of struggling all over again. As long as she was doing what she wanted to do, it was worth it.

“When I was in Brooklyn I was writing full-time in a little room which was about $275 a month, so you can imagine it was in the middle of nowhere. But that’s all I wanted, that room to write. If I wrote well I felt well.”

She paused and smiled again, remembering. “It was my whole life.”

“And what did you learn from devoting your life to writing?” I asked next.

I expected an answer that is heard quite often. A mixture of “never give up on your dreams” and the value of hard work, the earned freedom of going after what you love and want to do. That worthwhile joy of a life spent seeing, feeling, and experiencing. But Carol’s answer was surprisingly refreshing and true: she learned nothing.

“I’ve learned nothing, except that books make books, not experience, not human relationships. Books. And that’s the same advice I’d give anybody who was just starting out: Read! Read! Don’t stop reading! Read what you hate, read what you love. Decide why you love it, how you can borrow from the structure of a novel. You’re not doing anything but borrowing a way to tell a story. You’re trying to learn to tell a story.”

You’re not doing anything but learning to tell a story. Yes, that’s nothing—but everything all at once. By learning to write, you’re learning about yourself.

 

A Warsaw Chronicle is  available from Regal House Publishing.

PART II, to be posted forthwith.

Nora Shychuk has an M.A. in Creative Writing from University College Cork and a B.A. in Film Screenwriting and English from Jacksonville University. Her writing has appeared in The Lonely Crowd, The Quarryman Literary Journal, The Rose Magazine, and Pact Press’s Speak and Speak Again Anthology. In 2017 she was shortlisted for Cork, Ireland’s From The Well Short Story Competition and was also awarded one of two full Alumni Awards to attend the Iceland Writers Retreat (IWR) in April 2018. She lives in New York City.

On Writing ‘Path to the Night Sea’ by Alicia Gilmore

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Alicia Gilmore, Regal House authorI have always loved reading and creating, with words, with paint and pencils, from joining a Creative Writing class as a child – as an asthmatic and more than a little uncoordinated, team sports were never my forte – to studying art and then writing at university. Since childhood, when I realised that someone had created the book I held in my hand, I have wanted to write. To create. Perhaps it was reading Little Women and wanting so fiercely for Jo to succeed, to be Jo, or alternatively her sisters and enter the Marsh household. Perhaps it was Alice in Wonderland and wanting to throw myself down that rabbit hole. Books were a perfect escape when I was indoors with another bout of bronchitis. They gave me the world. From those tame beginnings to discovering books could not only captivate and inspire me, but thrill me and scare me, keeping me up at night reading under the blankets with a torch. Books introduced me and immersed me in new worlds.

Looking at art, being captivated by passages of paint, the use of light and shadow, thinking how did the artist do that? Reading novels and admiring the skill, the clever hints and clues, the beautiful play of words, wondering how did the author conceive of that? How did they do that? There have been more than a few false starts, a multitude of drafts, dreadful poems and sketches that will never see anyone else’s eyes but I love the process, being swept away into another space, another moment, when reality (and the day job and all the ordinary, everyday concerns) subside.

Path to the Night Sea by Alicia Gilmore, a Regal House authorPath to the Night Sea started as a short story in a fiction class with Sue Woolfe. Sue had given the class a selection of photographs and objects to spark our creativity and give us a physical stimulus to write a short fragment. I remember a small glass perfume bottle and a photograph caught my attention. The photo featured a woman in profile, seated at a piano, her hands poised to strike the keys. There was a cat sitting on top of the piano, and I wondered if these were the two most important things in her life – music and her pet. I started to write about this woman who would sit and play, not looking out of the curtained window, but indoors with her cat. Her face in profile, her ‘good side’… The perfume bottle that perhaps had belonged to a woman who would never get hold. A bottle that held scented memories… Ideas and elements came together and what is now a lot of Day One in the novel formed the original short story. Sue read the story, said I had written the start of a wonderful novel and she had to know what happened to Ellie. I realised so I wanted to know too.

Coal Cliff, Australia, setting for Path to the Night Sea, a Regal House title
Coal Cliff

The story became darker the more I delved into Ellie’s world. Seven days seemed the fitting structure for Ellie to be introduced to the reader and for her to seek her path, tying in with the religious dogma she’d heard from her Grandmother and Father. Listening to music by Nick Cave and Johnny Cash helped me establish the mood at times and gave me the impetus to embrace the flaws and the darkness. When I was writing the first drafts, I was living near the beach and the waves, particularly during storms, formed a natural soundtrack. If I peered out from my desk, I could catch glimpses of the ocean. By the time editing was underway, I had moved to a house that backed onto the bush and had inherited a cat. Listening to the raucous native birds, possums scurrying up trees and across the roof at night, dealing with the odd snake and lizards, plus watching the cat, heightened those natural elements of the story.

coal_cliff_viewI was concerned about and for my characters. I needed to ensure that Arthur in particular had moments, however fleeting, when he was ‘human’, and that Ellie, despite her circumstances, not be passive. I found myself going off in tangents in early drafts with minor characters and subplots but judicious readers and editing brought the focus back to Ellie and Arthur, and the confines of restricted world they inhabit.

I had thought of letting Ellie go one morning years ago when I woke up and heard the news about Elizabeth Fritzl kidnapped and abused by her father. In my drowsy state listening to the radio, the reality of her situation came crashing in and I wanted to put my humble writings aside. What was fictional pain in the face of such devastating reality? Even in 2018, the newsfeed this week is full of children being trapped at home by their parents, the neighbours unaware. Path to the Night Sea is my way of using language to explore familial dysfunction, small town horror, and ultimately, hope.

Regal House author Alicia Gilmore

 

Alicia Gilmore lives in New South Wales, Australia. Her debut, Path to the Night Sea, is a contemporary gothic novel exploring the dark secrets hidden within an otherwise idyllic coastal setting. Alicia has had short stories published in Phoenix and Cellar Door. In 2012, she was a contributing writer and lead editor of Burbangana. In 2009, Alicia received an Allen & Unwin / Varuna Publishers Fellowship that included a residency at Varuna, the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Written on the Wind

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mountain view in GeorgiaHalfway to Tallulah Falls, my son spills his entire bottle of Gatorade into his lap. “Um, Mommmmmay?” He says in a tentative, keening voice, emphasis on the last syllable, the way he always does, adding a frantic edge to what is not really an emergency. “I spilled my drink.” I sigh, tilting back my own water bottle and taking an eager gulp. Thankfully I have leather seats, though we didn’t bring any spare pants and I have no idea how he’s going to hike down a mountain with his butt soaked through.

“We’ll figure it out,” I say to my husband, who is in the driver’s seat, and turn up the radio, melting into the sunlight-warmed car, listening to the equally sunny, warm voice of Chris Cornell. I’m happy, because I’ve just signed a contract with Regal House Publishing for my much-beloved-and-agonized-over manuscript, Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree. I haven’t told anyone yet, save for the two people in this car with me, and my friend Alice. We are taking an impromptu drive to the mountains – one of my biggest sources of inspiration, and part of the novel’s locale – to celebrate. We’ve had coffee and breakfast already, and soaked pants or not, we’re going out into the air to watch the last remnants of autumn drift from the trees. The burgundy, green-yellow, and day-glow orange of the leaves cannot wait for us any longer.

The mountains are my happy place. Long before I ever knew I had ancestors who hailed from there, I relished my visits to Helen, to Hiawassee, to Tallulah Gorge, to Mt. Airy. There is a quality to the air, and it’s not just the clean, thin breath of the mountain, the fog that settles over the crisp leaves – it’s the spirit there, the life-force. You can taste it, you can feel it running over your skin, making it cool. The way the light falls on the red earth, the mottled gray-brown trees, the blue of the sky – like the most underrated colors in the Crayola box, they alight my senses and make me breathe in deep. If you listen, you can hear the whispers of the trees.

Lillah Lawson Regal House authorUp the mountain, we stop in the gift shop and buy the kid a pair of leggings and a piece of rock candy in his newest favorite color; cyan. On the way outside, he stops to study a taxidermied fox. We visit the museum exhibit, and I point out the boxcars, the butter churn, the crisp, thin white dresses with their square collars; all relics from a time gone by, with lessons to be gleaned. He nods, but isn’t really paying attention. What use does an eight year old have for sack dresses? He wants to get outside, into the air, to touch the stone and bark, to walk the paths, to hear the delicious crunch of the leaves beneath his feet, and I don’t blame him.

It is a bond we share, this love of the outdoors. Together we have traipsed through forests in Rutledge, swam in the lake beneath Mt. Airy, stood under Ana Ruby Falls, marveled at the ceremonial mounds in Sautee-Nacoochee, collected shells on the beach at Jekyll Island, touched statues in the square in Savannah, bent down to smell mountain herbs in Hiawassee, dipped our feet into the creek, counting turtles basking in the sunlight in Athens, and stood on the banks of the Oconee River in Nicholson, Georgia, fishing with my Papa.

Callum and Georgia MountainsWhen he was two he wandered off while I was putting his carseat in – I turned and he had vanished. Those ten minutes felt like hours, and when we found him, he was wandering out of the woods – the forests in Oconee County are heady and thick with skinny, gray-brown pine trees, tall and imposing, but full of a gentle kind of calm, as though benevolent ghosts might pass their days there in a cocoon of sweet silence – with our little beagle in tow, humming a little tune as his fat, toddler hands grazed each tree, oblivious and full of joy. He is a natural wanderer, my kid – and while it isn’t always ideal, and are sometimes stressful, these wanderings – I always understand them. I always understand him. In so many ways just like me, but in others so wholly different, so pure and clear-eyed and awake. I feel I know him better than I’ve ever known myself. He is a natural wanderer, fluent in the woods, a real-life tree hugger. He has always felt at home there in the silence of the woods, a place where he is heard and understood, nurtured and adored.

It is a gift I passed along to him, the one I’m most grateful for. Just like every other kid his age, he’s more interested in video games, Captain Underpants and YouTube videos than he is anything else, but he’ll stop everything if I say, “Want to go for a hike?”
I make it a point to walk behind him, present and ready should he have need of me, but content to watch his footfalls on the path, clumsy and childlike but full of innocent purpose. He blazes down trails, forgetting us, forgetting all. He has been begging for a compass for years but he doesn’t really want one – he has his own sense of purpose, his own rhythm that he dances to. I think when he’s an adult, he’ll really love Thoreau.

Georgia mountain streamWhen he graduates high school, I plan to take him on a hike through the Appalachian Trail. I haven’t told him yet, but it’s a secret dream. It seems poignant, appropriate. I can picture him, sweaty blonde hair, cheeks flushed with red in the cool air, panting with exertion, a heavy backpack weighing down wide shoulders. Undoubtedly he’ll have spilled his Gatorade on his pants, or tripped and skinned a knee, but there will be joy.

For now, my husband and I follow his lead, his skinny legging-clad legs pumping double time down the small trail, as though we’re late for something important. As it turns out, we are – just as we arrive at the first viewing platform, the people gathered there drift away and we see that the noon day sun has just settled on the trickling water, glinting off the rocks, making them look like diamonds. It is what photographers call perfect light. The water pools, and the cool air hints at what it might feel like to dip your fingers in. We stand there, forgetting to take our photos, content instead to just stand and bear witness. People fall away, and it’s just us there, the rock solid and welcoming beneath our feet, the water below quietly trickling a Hello.

My son takes a mischievous look around, and seeing no people in his vicinity, gives us a sly grin and lies down right on the rock, spreading out his arms and legs, closing his eyes and tilting back his head to the sun. He is making a stone-angel.

I laugh, shake my head, and say, “You’re ridiculous.” It’s true, but its said with the utmost love and respect, because it is a kind of ridiculous I understand, and covet, and miss.
He grins, but doesn’t answer. There’s no needs for words here. They are all unspoken, written on the wind.

Regal House author Lillah LawsonLillah Lawson is the author of the upcoming work of historical fiction Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree. When she isn’t writing, you can find her out traipsing through the forest, cycling, playing bass, or parked in a corner with her nose in a book. She currently resides in North Georgia, where she lives out in the country with her husband, son, her two sardonic cats and a goofy dog.

The Seeds of Curva Peligrosa

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When six-foot Curva Peligrosa rides her horse into Weed, Alberta, after a twenty-year trek up the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she stops its residents in their tracks. A parrot perched on each shoulder, wearing a serape and flat-brimmed black hat, and smiling and flashing her glittering gold tooth, she is unlike anything they have ever seen before. Curva is ready to settle down, but are the inhabitants of Weed ready for her? With an insatiable appetite for life and love, Curva’s infectious energy galvanizes the townspeople. With the greenest of thumbs, she creates a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger, her rifle and six-guns never far away.

Then a tornado tears though Weed, leaving all the inhabitants’ lives in disarray and revealing dark remains that cause the Weedites to question their very foundations. And that’s how the novel starts, with the twister hurtling Curva’s purple outhouse into the center of town, Curva inside, “peering through a slit in the door at the village dismantling around her.”

From then on, we follow Curva and the Weedites as they recover from the chaos that follows. As the above synopsis shows, a good portion of Curva Peligrosa’s narrative takes place in the fictional small town of Weed, Alberta, about twenty-five miles from what is now a major city, Calgary. When I, Lily MacKenzie, left the city in 1963, the population was two hundred fifty thousand. Today, Calgary, and its environs, has well over a million people.

While Curva Peligrosa doesn’t have autobiographical roots (I’m not Mexican American or six feet tall. Nor do I have a gold tooth!), it does have some parallels to historical moments in the province. When I was growing up in that area, agriculture was the main source of income. But in 1947, significant oil reserves were discovered at Leduc, Alberta, ushering in the oil boom that continues today. The excitement over extracting black gold from the earth brought job seekers and others to the area, eager to exploit the province’s riches.

I must have registered these developments subliminally, even though it wasn’t something I was particularly conscious of at the time. And as a young woman, I did secretarial work for Sinclair Canada Oil and other American petroleum companies. Impressionable, I thought the Texas accents signified power and prosperity and wanted to emulate them, faking a drawl whenever I could. It took me a while to realize that, in fact, many Americans were taking over our land and much of its oil.

My association with these (mainly) southerners fueled my interest in moving to America in my early twenties. Eventually I became an American citizen so that, as a single parent, I could take advantage of California’s university system and earn degrees (a B.A. and two Masters degrees) from San Francisco State. So while my early contact with these oilmen may not have been personally promising at the time, the experience propelled me into seeking higher education that wasn’t then available to me in Canada. However, the earlier image of American oilmen making off with our prairie identity had been planted. It stayed with me, surfacing in Curva Peligrosa and in Curva’s concerns over what she was witnessing in Weed, a town she had recently made her home. But none of this was intentional when I began the narrative. I had no idea then where it would take me.

In the novel, Shirley, an americano who is buying up nearby land so he can own all of the oil rights, represents the kind of southerner from my earlier experience. In Curva Peligrosa, he ends up being a villain in the old sense of the word where many readers will end up booing him. In turn, Shirley seems to embrace that identity and to enjoy the turmoil he is creating, not only in Curva, but also in the Weedites themselves. I had created a kind of Trumpian character long before Trump had brought chaos to America.

Like Curva, I’m not averse to some kinds of development, but I do recognize that the word can be misleading. In certain cases, it might represent growth and advancement for the people involved. For example, the Blackfoot tribe in Curva Peligrosa benefit from the oil wealth. It allows them to build a museum that highlights Native life and also to open their own university. Under the leadership of their chief Billie One Eye, the wealth gives them an identity they otherwise had lacked, even though they sold out to the americano in order to enrich their tribe.

But in many other instances, such development can deplete the land of valuable resources and drastically disturb the environment, improving a few lives but enslaving many, not unlike what we are witnessing today in America. The continued practice of mining and burning coal doesn’t make sense given its harmful effects on the environment. This imbalance becomes one of Curva’s concerns. She also hates how life’s pace has speeded up, not leaving time for the basics, such as enjoying leisurely meals with friends and loved ones, fiestas, and sex.I hadn’t set out to write a novel that harbored a political slant, but once I became involved in Curva’s quest, I didn’t have any choice but to follow along and express her concerns. In the process, I learned how seeds planted in our unconscious early on do sprout and bloom in our writing.

 

Lily Iona MacKenzie is the author of two novels, Fling and Curva Peligrosa, and a poetry collection All This. Her upcoming novel, Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Lily’s poetry was also featured in the Pact Press anthology, Speak and Speak Again. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Lily also blogs.