“Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing--The Wiz,” is the epigram that begins Lanham’s meditation on his homeplace, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else,” which has been home to generations of white and black Lanhams from the time of slavery. To love this land where he could not find his first black ancestor’s grave in a cemetery full of white Lanhams, takes a deliberate effort to turn away from ideas of Africa as the motherland which many people of African descent have glorified to emotionally survive their ancestral trauma.
Instead, Drew Lanham tells us, “I’m a man of color—African American by politically correct convention…. In me there’s additionally an inkling of Irish, a bit of Brit, a smidgen of Scandinavian, and some American Indian, Asian, and Neanderthal tossed in, too…. There is also the red of miry clay, plowed up and planted to pass a legacy forward. There is the brown of spring floods rushing over a Savannah River shoal. There is gold of ripening tobacco drying in the heat of summer’s last breath. There are endless rows of cotton’s cloudy white. My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are in me; I am, in the deepest sense colored.” This sample of his voice suggests a writer who uses language with attention to its expressive power in both its literal as well as metaphoric elements. Winner of the 2017 Southern Book Prize, Winner of the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center, and named a “Best Scholarly Book of the Decade” by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Drew Lanham’s book is definitely an inspiring read for us all.
Next time you’re in the library make a point of visiting the expanded Mystery/Spy section. These are some of the library’s most popular books and they deserved more space. Now there are six additional shelves dedicated to mysteries. Look for the temporary sign pointing you to these new shelves.
Eileen Smith has now inventoried all of our Mystery/Spy and Fiction books. By the time you read this, nearly 75% of Coffman’s entire collection will have been inventoried. Audrey Estebo recently reported that residents have already this year borrowed 635 library items. This pace puts the library on target to loan as many items as it did during the COVID lockdown year of 2020! Nearly as popular as the library itself is our surplus book sales operation. Thanks to Audrey Estebo’s and Scott Magnuson’s stewardship and your support, last year’s sales were nearly equivalent to the library’s annual Coffman appropriation.
feedback on. It’s possible there have been countless other drafts along the way.
I’ve known Brian for coming on 20 years. We met in a novel writing class at the Loft Literary Center and joined with four others to create a writing group that’s still together today in a slightly different incarnation. Eighteen year ago, the draft of Ivory Black—then Every Tom Dick and Harry—was offered to the group for critique. The published book—added to the Recent and Relevant shelves today—is probably the sixth or seventh draft of that original book that I’ve read and given feedback on. It’s possible there have been countless other drafts along the way. Our writing group also workshopped Brian’s first novel, Whiteout, which had good reviews but sadly did not get wide distribution because it was self-published (a stigma that is fading in the industry). And I was lucky to read an early version of The Gravity of Love, a third novel coming out from Willow River Press on August 30. I haven’t read the final draft yet, but Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, calls it “a magnificent haunting duet of grief, absence, and the unshakeable bonds of family…a profoundly moving, profoundly human novel.” Yes, that’s two novels Brian’s published in 2023, after probably four decades of writing (probably six decades of writing if you count his academic work that earned him two PhDs—one in French and another in French literature). So it’s never too late to achieve your dreams. Brian’s perseverance is an inspiration to me, as it can be to anyone with a passion for creative expression. Whatever feeds your creative soul, do it as often as you can and with joy. If you’ve never been to a novel launch before, consider heading to Magers and Quinn in Minneapolis on August 30 at 7 pm. Brian will be in conversation with novelist Peter Geye, so it’s an event not to be missed. The event is free, but registration is required. Learn more at www.magersandquinn.com/events.
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