What is it like to release a new book in the middle of a pandemic? Last week Susan Beckham Zurenda wrote a little about what she was doing at home instead of touring for her book, Bells of Eli. One of the most common questions from audiences at the Reader Meet Writer Author series is "has the coronavirus crisis affected your writing?" "Yes," they all say, "yes, yes, of course. How could it not?" faces reflecting the blue-tinged light of a computer screen as they try to channel across a video chat at least some of the energy and enthusiam that happens by magic when they are in a room full of avid readers.

Renea Winchester, a dear friend of her ladyship, the editor and (she likes to think) a gardening soul sister, has taken a slightly different route.

Her ladyship, the editor, and Ms. Winchester bonded over seeds. One spring day many years ago her ladyship found in her mailbox an envelope with a handful of rosy pink kernels of corn. "This is dent corn from my Granddaddy Lum," said the short note tucked into the envelope, "it's been grown in the family for generations." The seeds were from Ms. Winchester, who had sent them after reading a post from her ladyship about her inability to grow corn.

That generous impulse is typical of Renea Winchester. She is all about doing things for others, whether it is donating books to libraries, saving daffodils in danger from a bulldozer, campaigning for the protection of the Tuckasegee River, or delivering elderberry syrup to local health care workers. She bribes road works crews with cookies to get them to spare wildflower patches. She is one of those people who manages to fit two hours worth of work into one.

So when her new novel, Outbound Train, was published just as most of the country was told to stay at home, Renea didn't let that stop her. She has donned her mask and visited local indie bookshops to sign stock. She donated copies to assisted living centers, because one of her friends said her 88 year old aunt had read and loved the story. She has also -- and this is no surprise -- been tireless in supporting the work of other writers in the same situation: Jim Hamilton, Claire Fullerton, Beth Kephart.

Outbound Train, set in her hometown of Bryson City, North Carolina, is the story of the iron-willed women of a local textile plant. There is a beautiful interview with the author about the book at the Advance Reading Copy blog that will make you want to buy a book for every woman in your family you've ever looked up to.

In 2107 Lisa Wingate published Before We Were Yours, a novel based on a true story about a Memphis-based adoption organization that kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families in 2017. One of the people who read the book was Diane Plauche, who found much of the story achingly familiar.

Plauche is a volunteer with the Historic New Orleans Collection museum. In 2015, she began assisting the museum in creating a database of historical Lost Friends advertisements, through which formerly enslaved people desperately tried to find their lost families in the decades following emancipation. To date, Diane has entered over 2500 unique ads, and tens of thousands of names in the museum's database, preserving the histories of thousands of families. Plauche wrote to Wingate about the project, saying "There is a story in each one of these ads."

Wingate agreed. Her new novel, The Book of Lost Friends, was just released last month.

On Thursday, May 28 at 7:00 pm the Reader Meet Writer Author Series will host a special online event with Lisa Wingate and Diane Plauche, in conversation with the author Kristy Woodson Harvey. They will be discussion Wingate's new novel, and the little-known facet of American life that inspired it.

Tickets are available at the following bookstores:

Like every thinking, feeling person in this country, her ladyship, the editor has spent the last week becoming more and more horrified by the violence that has erupted across the country. "The violence," she writes, as if it were some sort of natural disaster, like a hurricane, when in truth it is OUR violence. The burning cars, destroyed shops, bleeding protesters. These things are not the fault of a virus racing through the population. These are the terrible acts of violence people have committed upon each other. There is no escaping the reality of that.

Her ladyship was left reeling between grief and anger, each so entangled with the other it was sometimes hard to know which emotion she we feeling. It seems to her there should be some other word which encompasses both.

As she has done her entire life when troubled or in turmoil, her ladyship, the editor, revisited the books that have helped her to understand and make sense of a senseless world. This past weekend, she re-read every book she owned by James Baldwin. In particular an interview he had with Studs Terkel in 1961:

"I'm not mad at this country anymore: I am very worried about it. I'm not worried about the Negroes in the country even, so much as I am about the country. The country doesn't know what it has done to Negroes. And the country has no notion whatever--and this is disastrous--of what it has done to itself. North and South have yet to assess the price they pay for keeping the Negro in his place; and, to my point of view, it shows in every single level of our lives, from the most public to the most private."
--James Baldwin to Studs Terkel, 1961

You can listen to the full interview here

Of course in a crisis book people turn to books. Our faith that books can change our lives for the better and build bridges between people remains a core belief. "Books are good. Books help. We believe that." posted Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, SC after their windows were broken. "What's the last book that shifted your worldview?" asked Michelle Cavalier of Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs, Louisiana in the store newsletter this morning. Hers was Born a Crime by Trevor Noah:

Read about our world -- Cavalier House Books, Denham Springs, GA

An Antiracist Reading List -- Ibram X. Kendi

Black Lives Matter -- The Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, MN

Read independently, and shop local now so you can shop local later.

When Alissa Redmond, the relatively new owner of South Main Book Company in Salisbury, North Carolina, announced that she supported the removal of the Confederate monument "Fame" she found her bookstore added to a Facebook page called "Boycott Salisbury," and its list of businesses to boycott "into bankruptcy."

The page, since taken down, had some unintended consequences. The community rallied around the targeted businesses, and more than a few local businesses asked to be included on the list, stating their solidarity with their fellow entrepreneurs that had been singled out for boycotts. Redmond said the day "Boycott Salisbury" went live was the most profitable one the store had since she took over ownership thanks to the Salisbury citizens who came out to support their local shops and restaurants.

South Main Book Company was designated an essential business in the COVID-19 crisis for its role in providing educational supplies and books to the community. Among other things, Redmond regularly stocked up the Little Free Libraries at schools in the county, and worked with the school system to promote reading for students during the pandemic.

Now the store is looking to encourage the momentum created by the local controversy. "I'm doubling down and donating antiracist titles to the Little Free Libraries of Rowan County this summer," stated Redmond. The store has create a GoFundMe campaign and says for every $500 that is raised, South Main Book Company will donate 100 copies of antiracist books to the Little Free Libraries in the county. They have already ordered over 800 books, which include:

ANTIRACIST BABY by Ibram X. Kendi
THIS BOOK IS ANTIRACIST by Tiffany Jewell
GHOST BOYS by Jewell Parker Rhodes
THE POWER BOOK by Roxanne Gay et al
WHY WE CAN'T WAIT by Martin Luther King, Jr.
STAMPED: RACISM, ANTIRACISM, AND YOU
by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
WHO WAS ROSA PARKS by McDonough, Yona

Click here to donate to the campaign

Read independently, support black-owned bookstores, and shop local now so you can shop local later.

The South has lost one of its most beautiful voices. Brad Watson, the quietly loved writer of The Heaven of Mercury and Miss Jane, died suddenly of a heart attack last week, leaving behind two novels, two short stories collections, and many heart-broken people.

Silas House, in his recent talk in the Reader Meet Writer Author series, spoke of Watson, who had been a mentor of his:

"I just think Miss Jane is one of the most beautiful American novels to come out in a long time. Brad Watson was just a brilliant writer and such a witty, great, generous person, and I'm just so glad I got to work with him."

Alane Mason, his editor at W. W. Norton, called Watson a writer "who wrote with the most extraordinary and profound awareness of the beautiful and cursed human body and its frailties" and offered a list of what he called "unmatchable and in some cases nearly unmentionable" moments in his work, including:

*best ever, anywhere, description of a dog barking outside a door
*ditto of a dog watching a streetlight change
*most horrific Southern barbecue
*worst marital argument, in which a man shoots himself in the foot to end it.

Admit it. "Most horrific Southern barbecue" is worth reading everything Watson ever wrote just to find it.

Read independently, support black-owned bookstores, and shop local now so you can shop local later.

Southern readers lost another friend last week. Mama Red, the elderly mother cow who was the inspiration and, perhaps it is not too much to say, spiritual center of One Good Mama Bone, the debut novel by South Carolina author Bren McClain, passed away last week. She was 29. Which is about 21 years older than most cows ever live.

McClain, who is from a cattle ranching family, bought Mama Red from her father in 2008 to save her from being slaughtered--the fate most cows after they can no longer bear young. It was an early morning encounter with Mama Red, standing in the corner of her pen, bellowing for her calf in a field and several fences away, that became the central theme of the novel McClain was trying to write:

"I would not see it yet, but she and the others had pushed the end post forward with such force that it angled out as if it was an arm waving at something familiar. And it was. Their babies. They were some thirty yards away, at the other end of a grassy lane. Like their mamas, they, too, stood huddled. They, too, sent forth sounds. Deep ones. Long ones."

One Good Mama Bone was published in 2017 featuring Mama Red at the center of the story and immediately became a Southern favorite. McClain, who never met a book club she didn't like, did approximately 187 book signing events at local bookstores within the space of 90 days. At least, that is what it seemed like to those following her Facebook and Instagram posts. And everywhere she went readers came to know and love Mama Red. They sent her paintings and aprons and knitted things and wrote songs. Lately, they have been sending facemasks.

Mama Red became a kind of patron saint of Southern book clubs and a living symbol to readers of the beauty and power of motherhood. Reviewers sometimes described One Good Mama Bone as a celebration of the maternal instinct, but "a veneration" is what the author called it in an interview: " It’s about an attitude of service—no, a heart of service—to someone else’s needs, someone whose life you can make better, stronger." Bren McClain said that Mama Red was her link to the divine.

On July 22nd, that link was broken. As McClain wrote, "Mama Red's work on earth is done. She has returned to God."

Why are author events so popular? Authors aren't performers by nature, sometimes just the opposite. And a book, like any work of art should stand or fall on its own merits, shouldn't it?

Well, yes, but.

Her ladyship, the editor, likes author events because she likes to hear about the story behind the story -- why a writer decided to write it, that strange and magical moment when they realized that an idea could become a story, the strange, winding path it took from inside the writer's head to in the pages of the book she is holding.

It is a creative process that never fails to fascinate. And often her ladyship finds that hearing a writer talk about creating the story deepens and enhances what she finds when she reads it.

Such it was when her ladyship was introduced to Shawn Cosby, author of the beautifully gritty noir novel, Blacktop Wasteland.

It is an oddity of the pandemic that her ladyship has attended more author events via video from her living room couch in the past three months than she has been able to attend in person in the last three years. Cosby's event was one of her favorites: funny, smart, compassionate, and very down to earth, it made her almost sorry she had already read the book.