This week’s list ties into my theme of water. See Ron Houchin’s #3 and Serenity Gerbman’s #5. And of course all good writing ties into the idea of perseverance in some way or another. 

First up, Ron Houchin, one of my favorite poets.  Ron’s newest book is Museum Crows (Salmon Publishing of Ireland, September 2009). Other titles include, Birds in the Tops of Winter Trees (Wind Publications, 2008), Among Wordless Things (Wind Publications, 2004), Moveable Darkness (Salmon Publishing, 2003). Ron’s work was recently published in Still, the wonderful new Appalachian literary journal edited by Silas House, Jason Howard, and Marianne Worthington. Here Ron reads his poem Playing the Piano, published in Motif: Writing by Ear, an anthology of essays, stories, and poems related to music (Motes Books, 2009).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFHzAcdgcYc

Ron will teach the master poetry class at this summer’s LMU Mountain Heritage Literary Festival the second weekend in June. For more information, go to: http://www.lmunet.edu/MHLF/

 Ron gives us five titles that he feels “definitely deserve another shot at the light.” Thanks, Ron.

1) The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, Dave Smith

2) Tracy’s Tiger, a novel by William Saroyan

3) What Water Left Behind, poetry by Rutger Kopland

4) Six O’Clock Mine Report, poetry by Irene McKinney

5) Report to Greco, an autobiography by Nikos Kazantzakis  These five range in your chosen decade: the Kopland book I bought and read in 2001, the Dave Smith book, I had in my hands over the holidays.

Our next list comes from Serenity Gerbman, Director of Literary Programming at Humanities Tennessee. This literary programming includes Southern Festival of Books, one of the nation’s premiere book festival, located in Nashville, TN (http://www.humanitiestennessee.org/festival/current.php), Tennessee Young Writers Workshop (http://www.humanitiestennessee.org/youngwriters/index.php) and Chapter 16, Tennessee’s new virtual center for the book (http://www.chapter16.org/)

Serenity says of her annotated list, “I have stuck to books by Southerners…”

1) Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet by Eugene Walter. This book is an oral autobiography told by Eugene Walter over some months to Katherine Clark. Walter published one well-received novel (“The Untidy Pilgrim”), but was also one of those fortunate people who seem to exist at the center of important moments. He was part of the founding of the Paris Review, lived and worked in film during the Fellini years in Rome, and had an apartment in Greenwich Village during the days when artists and writers abounded there. He tells these stories with great charm and wit, offering a fascinating look at the lives of people ultimately much more famous than he. However, it is the first section of the book, chronicling his childhood in 1920′s Mobile, Alabama that is so rich and vivid in detail that one feels the heat emerging from the sidewalks and hears the cry of peddlers’ carts in the streets.

2) The Heaven of Mercury: A Novel by Brad Watson. Despite being a finalist for the National Book Award in 2003, Watson’s compelling debut novel seems to have missed out on the public acclaim and familiarity that it deserves. Any Southern novel that contains Gothic elements inevitably draws comparison to Faulkner, although many critics at the time noted Watson’s lighter touch with prose and humor. The characters in Watson’s novel are the type we recognize for their flaws and their mistakes, so like our own, and they stay with us. Set in the fictional Mercury, Mississippi early in the 20th century, in the novel’s most powerful thread, Finus Bates’ lifelong love for Birdie Wells rivals the famous passion felt by Florentino for Fermina in “Love in the Time of Cholera.” This is among the best Southern novels published in the past 25 years.

3) A Short History of a Small Place by T.R. Pierson. While T.R. Pierson’s name is well-known among Southern readers, and this is his bestselling and best-known book, still it may be lost unless we keep recommending it to readers, particularly younger ones. And that would be a shame, as this comic masterpiece set in the the fictional Neely, N.C. deserves to survive as a classic Southern novel. Loosely following the life of the young Louis Benfield, it is the cast of sublimely yet believably eccentric characters populating the town that brings the book to life. The best way to read it is aloud, to someone else, with frequent stops for laughing to the point of tears.

4) The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. My favorite story is “Why I Live at the P.O.” Before I read her, embarrassingly late in my reading life, I knew that Eudora Welty was a brilliant writer, but I did not know that she was sharply, achingly funny.

5) Lifeguarding: A Memoir of Swimming, Secrets and the South, by Catherine McCall. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, McCall grew up in a rarefied world but was not rich, making her both a part of and an outsider to the upper crust world of Louisville, Kentucky in her 1960s youth. The secrets that her family struggled to keep–about their precarious finances and about her father’s alcoholism–shape her life, and it is only in the pool as a junior champion swimmer that she feels even remotely certain of anything. As McCall reaches adolescence and young womanhood, she keeps a secret herself, that she is gay. In that world and time, it could not be acknowledged. But McCall grows up, and lives to tell all of the secrets in this book. McCall’s writing style is direct and unsentimental, but her use of language precise and beautiful, making this a story that stays with you.