SOUTHERN CROSS

Front cover of Southern Cross

Janet Faulk, a native Alabaman now working in New Iberia, Louisiana, stays close to her southern roots when she writes most of the time. However, when she discovered a diary written by an anonymous Alabaman who traveled abroad to find his fortune following the War Between the States, she became fascinated by his account of a colony of Alabamans who settled in Brazil and moved her literary interests farther afield. Over a decade later, after transcribing the handwritten diary of an anonymous man who authored the Brazilian Travel Diary, she wrote finis to Southern Cross. 

Based on a true account, but written in the tradition of “non-fiction fiction,” Southern Cross also mesmerizes readers with a love story between the major characters, John Foster and widowed Kate Teal who develop a shipboard romance en route from Baltimore, Maryland to Brazil. The romance is related in deft, accessible prose, and Kate’s life of “inconsistencies…in which she moves toward something rather than away from something” keeps the reader transfixed about her survival once she departs from Mississippi near the Escatawpa River for the hinterlands of Brazil.

Faulk’s finesse with description emerges in the first chapter; e.g., “Nothing brings buried thoughts to the surface like the first dark of evening. At twilight when shadows lay long and thin in the grass, the fading light of day pulls color along with it and orchestrates a symphony of evening sound. This is the time of day when it becomes difficult to tell a black cat from its shadow and stillness spills over the earth like indigo ink. Then, the night movement takes shape with the subtle rustle of a raccoon family easing along the water’s edge, the whirr of seven-year locusts creating a rhythmic background for an occasional bullfrog croaking and the singular intermittent chirping of a lone cricket…”

Faulk skillfully weaves rich descriptions of the diarist’s visits to farms and lumber operations scattered throughout Brazil and brings into focus the politics, slavery issues, and future of agriculture (cotton, sugar cane, etc.) in 19th century Brazil. Romantic scenes between John and Kate are interspersed in alternate chapters to sustain interest in the diarist’s detailed explorations of the diverse countryside.

Choctaws, African slaves, Brazilians—Faulk introduces international diversity among her cast of characters, working to achieve authenticity and remaining faithful to historical detail through the extensive research she completed. Her readings included the work of Zora Neal Hurston, Sylviane A. Diouf, and Sandra Medlock, Operations Manager, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. 

Conversations between John and Kate contain serious ruminations about religion and ethics, and the end of Southern Cross will leave readers contemplating a softer denouement, but Kate embodies a kind of Faulknerean observation that humans will not only endure, they’ll prevail. This is a real page turner, as well as a heart warmer told with certainty of tone and narrated with an instinct for detail and sure sense of self.

Janet Faulk

Janet Faulk is a native of northeast Alabama and has resided most of her adult life in south Louisiana where she lives with her husband, Rudy Gonzales. Southern Cross is her first historical fiction. Previously, she published a book of personal essays, The Road Home, and co-authored Porch Posts with the poet Diane Marquart Moore.

Available online from Amazon and signed copies by mail from the author (janet.faulk@yahoo.com).

SEASON OF FRIENDS

Vickie and Anne on porch

This summer has been a season of friends, traveling afar to be with them and staying at home to receive them, and the latest visitor was a long-term friend from New Iberia, Louisiana. Yesterday, Anne Simon, author of mysteries called “The Blood Series” — Blood in the Cane Field, Blood in the Lake, and Blood of Believers — sat a spell with us on the small porch facing our woods here in Sewanee, Tennessee. Presently, Anne, a retired district judge, has turned her attention from writing mysteries to telling the story of an African-American woman named Felicité who nursed yellow fever victims in New Iberia during the 19th century, and we enjoyed a good writers’ chat concerning the extensive research she has been doing regarding Felicité.

We sat on the porch “taking the air,” as we say in south Louisiana, and I was reminded of the essay I wrote for Porch Posts (co-authored with Janet Faulk-Gonzales) a few years ago. This morning, I re-read my last essay in this book entitled “The Ultimate Porch:” 

“It [the porch] would be a place to which people brought peace and conversation, laughter, and their willingness to take time out. For me, the ultimate porch would also be a dual haven, in early morning hours offering me a safe place where I could sit in silence, stilling the storm of some past suffering in my mind, or expressing myself in writing, all my senses effortlessly taking in the scene around me, interrupted only by the squawk of a crow bringing me messages of affirmation.

Mostly, I’d want to bring to it my “belonging”… with friends, family, and community… where, as C.S. Lewis said, we all saw the same truth: love. Evening would be the best time for porch sitting, a time like that of an old memory at early dusk when there was just enough light to read by, and my Grandmother Nell and I sat together in a scaling, green-painted swing, reading from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse: “The world is so full of a number of things,/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

In early September, we plan to venture over to LaGrange, Georgia to sit on the new porch of our friend, Mary Ann Wilson, who probably loves porches as much as I do and was laying the foundation for one when we first visited her in June. It’s a screened one overlooking a patch of Georgia woods “in the country,” she says, “a place I’ve never lived.” Every time she writes, she’s on that porch, enjoying a deserved retirement from the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, her “roofed-in observation post where she can sit to get a clear view of what’s in the world outside and that allows for amiable company…”*

Moon in a Bucket

*Introduction to Porch Posts by Diane Marquart Moore and Janet-Faulk Gonzales. Illustration by Paul Schexnayder in Porch Posts.

SPRING’S KISS

In 2014, Border Press published Between Plants and People, a book of my poetry about plant life accompanied by eighteen color photographs by Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan, a noteworthy botanist. It contained metaphors describing the impact of plants on humans — food plants, medicinal plants, and decorative plants, and is an innovative account of “humanistic botany” in poetry.

The second volume of plant poems I wrote this summer, with accompanying photographs by Dr. Sullivan, is now in press. Spring’s Kiss, a book of poetry praising the qualities of wildflowers that inhabit and create beauty in the plant kingdoms of the world, is a nod to Susan Albert’s: “One person’s weed is another person’s wildflower,” and many of those weeds are included in this volume. Medicinal, as well as aesthetic qualities of the plants, are touted in some of the poems, and the beautiful blooms of these weeds reinforce Albert’s observation about plants.

The cover of this volume is a photograph of Karen Bourque’s glass rendition of the Pickerel Weed as inspired by Susan Elizabeth Entsminger’s illustration of the aquatic weed in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown by Victoria I. Sullivan, and the photograph was used in the cover design by Martin Romero, a landscape architect who renders the final designs for my book covers.

Spring’s Kiss can be pre-ordered from Border Press, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375 for $20 including shipping and will also be available from Amazon by Aug. 15.

BETWEEN PLANTS AND HUMANS

If you're interested in humanistic botany or the inter-connectedness of plants and humans, you might enjoy this latest book of poetry that will be available from Border Press by month's end. The collection is entitled Between Plants and Humans and contains new and selected poems that I wrote about cultivated and wild plants and color photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan, a botanist and writer. 

The landscape of plants is centered mostly in the southeastern United States, principally in Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. Plants range from Japanese Magnolia to Rapeweed, and my mentions of them are often fleeting but indicative of the inter-relationships between plants and people.

Included in Between Plants and Humans is a particularly arresting story in the poem about the pitcher plant, a specimen for which we searched and found on the grounds of the Chattahoochee Nature Center in Roswell, Georgia. Of course, I'm partial to the lovely Japanese Magnolia that flourishes in the lush environment of southwest Louisiana and forms the design for the cover of this new book, shown at the top of this blog. Martin Romero, a landscape designer, did the artistic design work for Victoria's stunning photograph on the cover.

Between Plants and People, New and Selected Poems is not a textbook edition about plants, and readers who sometimes attribute anthropomorphic characteristics to members of the plant world should enjoy a stroll through this unusual "garden." Perhaps you'll recognize a few favorites.

Available in print from Amazon.

DEPARTURES

"My soul is constituted of thousands of images I cannot erase...I'm a grainy old, often silent, often flickering film," Charles Simic writes in his book, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks. This line spoke to my condition when I began writing my latest book of poetry, available on Amazon in a few days. Departures is the name of this volume, and a few people have asked me if the title indicates I intend to throw away my pen, or computer, as the case may be, and hang up my poetry hat. The answer is "no," as I'm already settled on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee, working on another volume.

Departures explores the lives and departures of loved ones—parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, an infant nephew, memorable teachers, godparents, musicians, an old friend—the faces of people who have passed on and left their imprint on my life...and about whom I often dream. The book is dedicated to my friend and mentor, Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate and author of Megan's Guitar and if you abandon me, who read the original manuscript of Departures.

I know that I just published a book of essays entitled Porch Posts with Janet Faulk-Gonzales, but Departures has been waiting in the wings for some time, and since I had a painting for the cover that my brother Paul rendered a few years ago, the book almost birthed itself and begged to be "out there."

An example from Departures entitled "Sister's Blue Baby:"

the only boy among three girls
was buried in blue satin

in a tiny steel box
that held the porcelain body

and a heart that struggled
against death

before his time;
his crippled valves

leaking a love
never expressed...

and only his mother felt.

I hope that those of you who read my work will take a look at those people whose "points of departure felt...the faces appearing often enough...[have left] enough of themselves with me."

Departures also available online at www.borderpressbooks.com. If snail mail is your preference, send orders to Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375, along with $12 plus $4 for shipping.

ON THE USE OF THE COMMON FORK AND KNIFE

It all started with a remark made by Lady Mary, a daughter who is being urged by her aristocratic parents, the Crawleys, to marry an heir to the family fortune in the televised Downton Abbey series. The scene is a country home in Edwardian England, circa 1912, and the discussion centers on a gentleman who is sole heir to the kingdom of the Crawleys. After watching the heir’s table manners, Lady Mary remarks that she could never marry a man who couldn't hold his fork like a gentleman. “Oh,” I said to my friend who was watching the series with me: “I know how Brits feel about Americans’ table manners, and I wrote all about it in my column, Cherchez la femme, back in the 70’s.”

At noon today I unearthed a compilation of the columns, which I once planned to showcase in book form, and read aloud the column involving the use of the common fork at the lunch table. After reading it, I decided that there could be some Downton Abbey fans who would enjoy the revised column I'm posting below:

Good manners rank with good grooming and good behavior. And if you don’t believe that adage, ask the British. They’re sticklers for the proper use of china, glass, and silver. I know because I underwent considerable teasing about my American style of eating when we lived abroad.

The problem had to do with the common fork. One noonday at a church camp in the Garden of Evangelism in the Elburz Mountains near Tehran, Iran, I was casually cutting a piece of meat with knife in my right hand and fork in my left. When I transferred the fork to my right hand to devour the meat, I found several Brits looking at me and snickering. “Oh, you Americans,” one of them commented. “You always do things the wrong way—and certainly the hard way.”

If you’ve never tried eating continental style in the manner that my British friend recommended, you must try forking food “the proper way,” as the Brits say. You spear meat with you fork and cut it off with the knife. With the meat fixed on the prongs of the fork (prongs down, prongs down) you place the knife blade underneath. The Brits say, “A slight twist will help to fix it firmly.”

Don’t stop with the meat. You also pile a small amount of potatoes and vegetables on the topside of the prongs, along with the meat. The heavily-laden fork is then conveyed to the mouth by twisting the wrist and raising the forearm slightly. The biggest “no-no” is that of changing hands. And you aren’t supposed to stick your elbows out and raise your entire arm either.

I worked on this fork operation for the ten days of church camp I attended that summer of 1974, but I was still viewed as a clumsy fork user. “Why?” I asked my British friends, “why isn’t the fork used to scoop food when it is fashioned with a gentle curve in the middle for holding food?” Well, they didn’t know, and no amount of researching turned up the answer either.

Actually, mention of the fork in literature dates back to the 11^th century when a lady journeyed from Byzantium to Venice. She married a rich Doge, Domenico Selvo, in 1070. The first person in history to mention forks was an Italian named Saint Peter Damian. He wrote that this Doge’s wife from Byzantium did not touch her food with her fingers. She carried it to her mouth with certain gold, two-pronged forks she had brought with her from Byzantium. At that time, people were shocked by the lady’s extravagances, and very few people followed her example.

Well, forks aren’t everything. The Brits at the Tehran camp didn't know how to eat watermelon southern style. They tried to cut the melon in dainty snips just the way they cut meat. “Look,” I told them in my best Louisiana drawl, “watermelons are to be held. Put down those forks and knives and watch me.” I grasped a large slice of melon with both hands, lowered my face, and zipped through the choicest pulp, swooshing the melon from one side of my mouth to the other.

“But what do we do with the seeds?” they asked. Would you believe that there are now Brits who returned from their stint in Iran to live in places like Sussex, London, Surrey, and Buckinghamshire who mastered the art of spitting watermelon seeds through their teeth almost forty years ago?

Yes, I know good manners are as important as good grooming and good behavior, but we Americans also believe that good digestion is vitally important. And how can you digest food properly if you’re uptight about conveying food on a heavily-laden fork to the mouth?

Just between us, in that seed-spitting contest, I was lucky to get one watermelon seed through my teeth with the first shot (which landed in the lap of the Anglican minister who was director of the camp). And, truthfully, I always eat watermelon with a knife – sometimes with a fork.

SOME CHATTER ABOUT CLABBER

Grandpa Paul – Clabber enthusiast & 
grandchildren not so fond of the drink

Yesterday morning after preaching a Pentecost sermon at St. Mary’s, the Episcopal Convent here on the bluff at Sewanee, Tennessee, I went into the refectory to breakfast with the congregants and Sisters and got into a conversation with Henry Hamman, publisher of Plateau Press. Henry had begun searching for his wife Kathy because he said that he had to get home and build a fence around his tomato plants – the ubiquitous deer on the Cumberland Plateau had been sniffing around his garden. I immediately went into a déjà vu about homegrown products; namely, the tomatoes that my Grandfather Paul used to grow in his backyard at Franklinton, Louisiana (the town where I was born)… and the memory lengthened into one about supper feasts in the “country.”

When I visited my grandparents during summers of the 40’s, the supper table often contained simple fare of thick slabs of Big Boy tomatoes, sliced cucumbers that I helped my grandfather pick, butterbeans left from lunch and warmed up, fried cornbread, and clabber. My grandfather’s supper consisted of only a tall green glass filled with clabber and crumbled cornbread, a concoction he drank throughout the summer.

At the age of nine, my appetite centered more on the vegetables than the strange concoction Grandfather Paul drank because I thought that clabber was a medicinal food he endured as a remedy for his condition of Bright’s Disease. Years later, I tasted clabber and agreed with the moniker it acquired through the Ulster Scots in the Appalachians – that of “bonny clabber.”

Clabber is simply curdled milk, or unpasteurized milk that has been allowed to turn sour at a specific temperature -- room temperature. As the milk curdles it develops into yogurt-like consistency. In this age of pasteurized milk regulations, the drink isn’t too popular anymore, and the pasteurization process kills the bacteria necessary for it to sour. The closest we can get to a clabbered drink is buttermilk. I’m told that if you heat clabber a little, the curds in it separate and become cheese.

Some farmers use clabber to feed their chickens as it provides calcium and protein for the chickens – the farmers claim that if chickens are fed this concoction, their meat is softer and they become better layers.

I have no idea where my grandfather got his raw milk because he didn’t own cows, but Washington Parish abounds in dairy farms, and he may have obtained milk from the owner of a cow that grazed on an open lot on 10^th Avenue in Franklinton, one that I skirted on the way to visit my Aunt Kathryn who lived about a block away from the cow. I’d get off the sidewalk and wade through weeds to avoid the harmless cow who kept her head lowered and had no interest in a frightened, nine-year old girl. My mother had a phobia about cows and passed on the fright to me, along with fear of lightning, tramps, and a host of other senseless anxieties. A contradiction to this phobia was my liking for the verse in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse about the “friendly cow, all red and white/I love with all my heart…”

A few decades ago, perhaps a thousand dairy farms abounded in Washington Parish, and I understand that today there are less than two hundred; however, the three parishes of Tangipahoa, St. Helena and Washington parishes have the largest concentration of dairy farms in Louisiana. I don’t know how much of the milk is used for curdling purposes, but in many rural areas, people still enjoy their milk soured to the stage of a firm curd. Remember the old nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet /sat on her tuffet/ eating her curds and whey?”

I recently read an article highlighting Russel Creel, who owns a dairy farm five miles east of Franklinton. Creel received the title of “Dairyman of the Year” from the LSU Dairy Science Club (once known as the Cow and Cream Club!), and I bet he knows how to make a good bowl of clabber since he has been in the dairy industry for over forty years.

By the way, clabber can be eaten with brown sugar, nutmeg, or molasses. However, my grandfather was a purist and ate it unsweetened, flavoring it only with fried cornbread (no sugar added). A Greenlaw, of Scots lineage, Grandfather Paul thought it was “bonny clabber.”

POSTCARDS FROM DIDDY WAH DIDDY: my latest book

It’s Spring at Sewanee, a felicitous time to publish another book of poetry, and I’m right on schedule with it because I anticipated bringing one into the world in May, my birthday month. A good friend plans to review Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy, but I usually mention my latest book for A Words Worth readers. I won’t review my own book – just wanted to give a thumbnail sketch of it a la blog.

About the cover: I have my mother’s collection of postcards from our family trip to California, during the late 40’s and planned to use one of them for the cover before I discovered that the one I wanted to use is a famous painting by a well-known, deceased western artist who lived in New Mexico, and the card was copyrighted after the 1921 cut-off date for expiration of copyrights – a copyright for ninety years! I did unearth a few of mother’s collection that had no copyrights printed on the cards and used one of these sepia-colored cards on the back cover of Postcards, but the front cover is a snapshot of my mother, my older brother Paul, and me – three of the principals traveling in the blue Ford coupe to Diddy Wah Diddy, my father’s name for California in 1946. California was Mecca, in his opinion, but when he uprooted his four children to make this odyssey, we weren’t too sure we wanted to live as gypsies traveling toward his envisioned paradise. The first few poems in Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy express the feelings of the entire family concerning this memorable trip, excepting my father.

Many of the poems in this volume are nostalgic; others speak of friends and ancestors, of aging, travels and nature. As lagniappe and for varied reading, I included three short stories that have been in a box for years.

My grandson Martin designed the cover of Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy, and the book is a product of Border Press, Sewanee, Tennessee.

Click on the title, Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy, anywhere in this post to go to a website for ordering. Write to Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375 for mail orders, and include a check for $12 plus $5, shipping and handling.

BANNER BOOK COVERS

Most grandparents are inordinately proud of their grandchildren, and I’m no exception. A few days ago when I posted a blog about Margaret Simon’s exceptional new YA book, Blessen, I felt a twinge of pride because my grandson, Martin Romero, designed the cover for Border Press, the independent press that publishes some of my books.

Martin has a degree in Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University School of Design in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has always had a penchant for art and design, beginning at the age of nine when he drew a perfect picture of his shoe while riding in a van to California with his Godmother Vickie and me. Later, he scheduled art classes at the Episcopal School of Acadiana, but decided against enrolling in Art at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas because he knew he had to earn a living! He pleased all of his family by completing the five-year curriculum in Landscape Design at LSU, sans debt, as he had a scholarship and worked eight-hour shifts, at times, in the evenings and nights while he attended college.

While at LSU, Martin illustrated a story I had written for him about a red, double-decker British bus marooned in a field near Opelousas, Louisiana.  The book was entitled The Cajun Express, and following graduation, he began designing book covers for Border Press in his leisure time, after working all day as a landscape architect in Madisonville, Louisiana. His efforts, from the beginning, have shown his eye for color and design, and the back covers of the books he designs are as interesting as the front ones, including small details rendered from front cover motifs.

Martin’s biggest job right now is as father of a little dynamo, one-year old Alexander Charles, whose greatest accomplishment is that of throwing his arms into the air to signify a touchdown for LSU, a video of which is on Facebook. Martin’s wife, Kristin, who has a job in advertising, also does consummate design work, so the family has a penchant for artistic renderings.

Here are a few of the book covers Martin has executed during the past ten years. Vickie Sullivan usually suggests components to be included in the design, and many of them are copies of wonderful paintings done by my brother, Paul, so the operation is a “family operation.” I just thought it was time to recognize those who do the “faces” of my books, as well as other titles in the Border Press collection. Merci and another c'est magnifique for Border Press’s eye-catching covers!

All of Martin's covers can be seen at the Border Press website. Border Press offers fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays, young adult and children's books.