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Across the Bridge - October 2020
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- by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
Thacker Mountain Radio Show host Jim Dees’ book recounts the furor over a Faulkner statue in the fabled author's hometown.
- by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
After two months in French lockdown, the author finds herself experiencing culture shock on her return to the States.
- Story by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
Mourning John Prine in France, where the author's extended stay turned into an indefinite lock-down.
- Story by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
Confined to a cottage in a countryside village, the writer gives an on-the-ground report of drastic changes in a timeless place.
- Story and photos by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory possesses the power to make even contemporary readers summon up their own most-cherished holiday recollections.
- Story by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
A couple of decades later the building would be ignited by a careless tailgater’s grill during a football game and burn to the ground. People made jokes about the Student Act being put out of its misery, but I was sad. All I could think about was the fact Truman Capote had read aloud there.
But like a singer singing his own song, pretty soon it became clear that, of course, it was exactly how the words were supposed to sound. And Capote’s almost shocking, lispy soprano was perfect to be the voice of Sook saying, “I made you another kite.”
My love for this Christmas story grows as I get older. It has everything, including a dog that dies; the dog always dies in the end. Now I am more than aware of how hard it is to write in such true rhythm with economy of narrative. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that I spent a year in Monroe County, in the same rural setting Capote described. I cut a Christmas tree in the same native woods, getting lost in the process. “Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels….” Perhaps the best Christmas of my life, or one of the best, was spent in a big house in a bosky oasis inside the Monroeville city limits but as secluded as Mongolia. My first husband and I decorated with fresh greenery and real candles and invited everyone we knew in town to come sing carols. It’s a wonder we didn’t burn down the landmark house, built by a local lawyer and, after his death, inherited by his daughter who had no apparent desire to stay in Monroeville. We didn’t have a cent but were caretakers for the hacienda-style mansion with its fabulous but dry-rotting furnishings. At the old upright piano we sang in our best carol voices, fueled by love and youth and beer and enthusiasm for life. As Bob Seger sang, “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” In truth, the house made me a tad miserable because I knew I’d never own it; even my romantic nature had to come to grips with that. For one thing, the daughter didn’t want to sell it, and, if she had, the asking price for the tile-roofed mansion would have been more than a couple of reporters for a weekly newspaper would see in their lifetimes. But for a short, magical, miserable while we were actors in a play with a grand set, seeing our reflections in borrowed mirrors and hearing the clock strike vanishing hours. That Christmas gathering was one of our best ever, both because of the house and despite it. I’ve never lived anywhere as grand since. It was a cold Alabama winter that followed the giddy December, and the house was too much to heat with its high ceilings and endless rooms. We kept the kitchen and one bedroom warm. One week the water in the toilet bowls froze, and we decided perhaps some practicalities were more important than sun porches, gilded mirrors large as pool tables and 10-foor-tall mahogany secretaries. We moved back to Auburn. What Capote tapped into, of course, is that all of us have a Christmas memory, though few of us can spin them into gold for others. Life has been so good to me, and I am surrounded by friends and enough family and dogs that forgive and forget. I think to have seen the woods that Truman Capote describes and to have smelled and touched its bounty is as close as you can get to writer’s heaven.
A visit to the Maine home of E.B. White, author of "Charlotte's Web" and "The Elements of Style," two of the most beloved books in the English language.
- Story and photos by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
He wrote in his boat house, hauling a typewriter in a wheelbarrow at day’s beginning and end. A commute, if you will. If you are not sure where to begin a search, go to the library. As is the case in most of Maine’s tailored towns, Friend Memorial Public Library was the loveliest building in the burg of Brooklin. You have to trust a region that values its libraries enough to make them shine. E.B. White is one of my literary heroes. He wrote thousands of well-chosen words for the New Yorker Magazine over five decades. He wrote books for children, including the classic Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. There are thick collections of his memorable letters. But the book I hold dearest is The Elements of Style, which White co-authored with his former Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr. “No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume,” The Boston Globe raved upon the publication of the third edition of the perennial bestseller. It is true. Better than grammatical rules reviewed is the “style approach” White made simple. Write with nouns and verbs. Do not overwrite. Avoid fancy words. And so on. It is the bible of spare, understandable writing. If you’ve ever written so much as a letter, you need this book. Beware, however, it will make you a vicious critic of some of the over-wrought writing in vogue these days. Pat Conroy, for instance, would have struggled in Strunk’s class or under a White edit; Donna Tartt would have flunked and fled. I found White’s grave at the back of the big city cemetery simply by figuring he’d take the same approach to death as he had to writing. Keep it simple. There he was – Elwyn Brooks White – beneath a plain Jane marker next to his wife, Katharine Angell, also of New Yorker fame. Name, date of birth, date of death. That’s it. I half expected to see someone’s worn copy of “Elements” on top of the grave, but White’s devotees would never part with their copies. I have the one I bought at Auburn in 1971 and my late husband’s dog-eared copy. The librarian was helpful and pointed out gifts from the Whites. There were two original Garth Williams drawings from the Stuart Little manuscript. The library has a small garden outside named for Katharine and E.B. White, who supported it with both money and hard work. Katharine helped with the garden design. I went to the general store across the street and bought a scone and a t-shirt. I doubt if White hung out there much as he avoided strangers who felt like they knew him. James Thurber wrote White would use the fire escape to get away from The New Yorker office whenever visitors he did not know arrived. “He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea and the Stork Club. His life is his own….” He’s been dead since 1985, but it still felt awkward hunting E.B. White. But I wanted to pay respects, that’s all. So many times he’s saved me from myself. Rather, very, little, pretty – these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words…. That’s the kind of advice that helps a writer, day after day, word after word.
Mystery author Julie Smith sets her detective novels in big cities - but the award-winning writer is embracing the slower pace of living here in Bay St. Louis.
- Story by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, photos by Ellis Anderson
Julie’s 20-plus books have been set in cities, New Orleans and San Francisco, so it is hard to imagine Julie living in a small, seaside, tree-canopied town with plenty of parking and little crime. But imagine again.
A few of Julie Smith's books
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Across the Bridge - July 2019
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She is a slip of a woman with eyes big and bright as a child in a Margaret Keane painting.
Cindy Easterling, architect and fused glass artist, has more energy than the proverbial law allows and a sense of humor about life and its many curve balls. Hurricane Katrina demolished much of the condo complex, including stairs, which her absent sister had just purchased as an investment in August of 2005. So, Cindy asked friends to hold the extension ladder while she climbed up to the third floor to see what was salvageable. “I looked like a turtle, climbing back down with a laundry basket strapped to my back.” |
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Across the Bridge - April 2019
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Buried beneath layers of duty, I found a tasty scrap of time to listen to good music. Getting older so far hasn’t meant more idle hours for what I love the most – playing old songs at top volume. With age should come that privilege. Every now and again I just say “no” to 96 choices of cable television shows and unlimited movies and emails stacked like cord wood. I have to hear my music, and by “my” I mean songs that have delighted, teased, moved, sustained and tormented me. The good stuff. |
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Across the Bridge - January 2019
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Prudence Bushnell looks like her name sounds. Neat, petite, well-dressed and well-groomed. Like a resounding success of a 1950’s upbringing, when Captain Kangaroo woke us up and our mothers put us to bed.
Friends, and I am one, call her Pru, which somehow changes everything. Pru has a wicked wit, the resume of a Bond girl and an intellectual curiosity that gets her into more jams than Nancy Drew. She is tough. |
Across the Bridge
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Her book – Terrorism, Betrayal & Resilience – is amazingly relevant to today’s world, and proof that often the dust must settle before you can see clearly the truth.
“The building swayed; a teacup began rattling; shards of glass and ceiling tile sprayed the area,” the book begins. “One thought swirled dreamily around my brain as every muscle in my body clenched in revolt. ‘I am going to die….’” |
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Across the Bridge - Dec/Jan 2019
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My home in the Pass is a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture Alpine chalet, with a steep roof capable of quickly shedding 20 feet of snow should South Mississippi ever get that much.
In a town of melon-colored beach cottages with palm trees and sun-loving perennials, my strange house doesn’t belong. Even the trees in its shady yard are all wrong, a plethora of hickories rare to the region. |
Across the Bridge
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Across the Bridge - Oct/Nov 2018
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For decades, in print and cocktail prattle, I’ve touted the Mississippi Coast as the best place on earth for festivals.
From Oyster Eve in the Pass to Dolly Should in the Bay, nobody does it better or more frequently. Even if you forgot all about Mardi Gras – and who would? - the Gulf Coast culture is sewn up with gossamer get-down, get-together thread. And I still say we should win some kind of national title for hosting elaborate shindigs at the start of a season or drop of a hat. |
Across the Bridge
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Across the Bridge - August/Sept. 2018
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I have a photographer friend in North Carolina who grew up in Louisiana. You can take the boy out of the pea soup humidity, but you can’t take the dread of it out of the boy.
When I’m on the coast and we email, Marc constantly asks about the local temperature. This year, in May, he referred to the Gulf Coast weather as “early brutal.” That’s about as apt as you can get. He sits on a beautiful mountaintop in North Carolina and worries about us. He probably swats at imaginary gnats. The reason I mention Marc is because recently I closed the little art gallery I attempted to get going in North Mississippi. Not enough interest. Read that, no interest. |
Across the Bridge
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Across the Bridge - June/July 2018
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Wild boars have always been good to me.
It was an Atlanta newspaper assignment to cover a wild boar hunt in Louisiana that led me to buy a houseboat on the Atchafalaya, which led me to spend 14 years of my life exploring the most exotic and regionally distinctive part of these United States, which led to my book Poor Man’s Provence, which, as Hank would say, has bought me a lot of bacon. That original story – wild boar hunt as bachelor party – wasn’t much, but at least I got the idea of how flat-out ugly a 200-pound pig with tusks can be. Didn’t make my mouth water. Now my prolific writer friend Anne Butler of Butler-Greenwood Plantation in St. Francisville, La., has her name on the cover of yet another book: Big Badass Boar Cookbook. |
Across the Bridge
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Across the Bridge - April/May 2018 |
My dog Boozoo is named for the late Zydeco king, Boozoo Chavis, though, honestly, I know little about the man or his music. Authorities say his accordion squeezed into existence modern Zydeco.
Chavis died only a few days after I adopted a year-old Boo from the pound, 17 years ago this month. I was staying in Henderson, La., and the French radio station was all about Boozoo, all the time. “What a great name,” I thought. The Lobo song about “me and you and a dog named Boo” ran through my head as well. Names are important. Children suffer mightily from cute attempts at naming by careless parents. I myself am a victim of bastardized spelling. |
Across the Bridge
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Across the Bridge - Feb/March 2018
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We were a Huntley-Brinkley family. The same way most American families in the 1960s swore by either Fords or Chevrolets, television viewers chose between Walter Cronkite or NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report for their news.
I’m not sure of the rationale for my father’s choice, and it was his choice, because the adults decreed programming. I still can feel the round, corrugated knob that changed channels on our black and white set, though I only did the honors occasionally, as on Sunday night when I knew we’d be watching “Bonanza.” We trusted Huntley-Brinkley, a no-nonsense duet of hard news, the memory of which makes it impossible for me to like the silly patter that passes for television news these days. And, of course, we got the local newspaper, as essential in every household back then as the calcium in milk for bone growth and tooth-brushing for general hygiene. We read it. Cover to cover. |
Across the Bridge
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Across the Bridge - Dec/Jan 2017
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A few years ago, friends gave me the album “Blood Oranges in the Snow” by an Ohio husband and wife folk duo that calls itself Over the Rhine.
I must have listened to the CD 300 times. The couple writes amazingly literate lyrics: We keep driving/we’re not afraid/ The snow in our headlights/Confetti in a parade…. But my favorite of the album’s holiday songs is not one of theirs but a cover of Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December.” Who amongst us hasn’t felt the soul-sapping dread of snow-plowing through the most sentimental of holidays on less than all emotional cylinders with not enough money, wanting to be somewhere else? |
Across the Bridge
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Above my bed in Iuka hangs Cat Island in all of its glorious aquarium-colored shadows, a pastel done in gauzy hues to keep me sane and calm when I’m far from the shore. My friend John McKellar of Bay St. Louis is the artist.
I never know where to start when talking about John’s talent. His “serious” landscapes are among my favorite paintings anywhere. But then there are his fun and folksy projects, for instance, the “Little Known Bluesboys,” including “Lil Willie Shakespeare, Trump, Picasso and Herman “Harpoon” Melville: I wail on the harp at all my shows, And the crowd be shouting ‘There he blows….’ |
Across the Bridge
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I’ve gone through most of my adult life expecting gracious living just around the corner, believing that one day I’d wake up and find myself in a Renoir garden outside of an Architectural Digest house in Audrey Hepburn’s clothes. I dream big.
It’s come to my attention this summer that this is never going to happen. Hope has been vanquished. Guests arriving in a steady stream from the beautiful coast to my humble, workaday place in northeast Mississippi have served as reality check. They are all deserving of the best I have to offer. And I suddenly realize it isn’t much. I was shabby before shabby was chic. |
Across the Bridge
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When someone you love dies, people irritate you. Friends especially. Lots of them do, anyhow.
Here is a for-instance. The ones who come up and ask you what stage of grief you are in are beyond irritating. “What stage are you on?” was how I always answered. Grief may have stages but they are in such a constant muddle that anger bleeds into denial that may, in an hour or so, morph into bargaining or depression, and so on and so on. Some wag once said that everything learned in sociology is either obvious or untrue. How obvious and true. |
Across the Bridge
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