I have collaborated with five publishers on six published works of fiction. But I have never experienced the good fortune and comradery that is unfolding right now in Mississippi.

Madville Publishing in Lake Dallas, Texas, has published Mississippians before. The beauty and subtlety of cover and interior design Madville created in February 2023 for Mississippi Delta poet Jianqing Zheng’s powerful collection The Dog Years of Reeducation so impressed me that I submitted my manuscript to Madville.

Now, in a wondrous, cosmic spark of fate, Madville Publishing will release three works of fiction by Mississippi writers in rapid succession in July and August.

Madville just released my novel, The Lakes of Southern Hollow, the story of three high school seniors in the Ozarks falling in love with each other, all at the wrong times. The story is about the powers of music, friendship, addiction, love, and courage. Born and reared in Springfield, Missouri, I’ve now lived twenty-six years in Flowood, Mississippi. Here’s the book celebrated next to the register at Lemuria Books in Jackson.

August 20, Madville will release fictions by two more Mississippians: R. J. Lee’s novel, The Majestic Leo Marble , and Julie Liddell Whitehead’s collection, Hurricane Baby: Stories

Suddenly, I am on a team, and it’s really a thrill.

We’ll team up first at Lemuria Books on Thursday, July 25, at 5 p.m. Julie Liddell Whitehead will be in conversation with me about The Lakes of Southern Hollow. Ring Lemuria at 601.366.7619 for your signed copy or travel to https://www.lemuriabooks.com/The-Lakes-of-Southern-Hollow-p/9781956440911.htm.

I will then interview Julie about Hurricane Baby: Stories on Saturday, August 24 at noon at Lemuria. See her book and event details at https://www.lemuriabooks.com/Hurricane-Baby-p/9781956440959.htm

R.J. Lee will come to Lemuria Books Saturday, August 31 at noon, and I’ll be there. See https://www.lemuriabooks.com/The-Majestic-Leo-Marble-p/9781956440935.htm

Then the three of us will panel up and appear Saturday, September 14, at the Mississippi Book Festival, and Madville Publishing will have a table there so you can see how beautiful its books are.

We’ll all three travel to Natchez for the Mississippi Library Association Thursday, Oct. 10, at the Natchez Convention Center, Natchez, for a Mississippi Author Panel (New Mississippi Voices). See https://mla42.wildapricot.org/conference2024

And we’ll take our trio show on the road Saturday, Nov. 2nd, to the Louisiana Book Festival, at the State Capitol, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. https://www.louisianabookfestival.org/featured-authors-panelists/featured-participant-lineup/

For Christmas cheer, we will trio into Starkville’s The Book Mart & Café on Sunday, November 10 from 11 a.m. till 3 p.m. for the store’s Christmas Open House. Follow The Book Mart & Café, owner Carolyn Abadie, and her two outrageous pugs at https://www.facebook.com/BookMartCafe/

Wow! That’s a lot of travel and excitement. I have to thank Robert Kuehnle (R. J. Lee) for a whole lot of fellowship and support here. Several of these dates would not have happened without him, and he is the author of 17 books!

Natchez native and Oxford resident R. J. Lee has written The Majestic Leo Marble. It is an extraordinary work of what many call autofiction—a fiction that hews close to autobiography but deploys arc of character and changes in name, scene, events, and dialogue that make the work fiction, almost a fictive memoir. I found it to be a revealing portrait of a life of longing, struggle, learning, hope, and, at last, a hard-won triumph of community and dedicated love. Born just after World War II, main character, Leo Marble, grows up closeted in the confines of fictional Beau Pre, Mississippi (feels like Natchez), where generational roots run deep. As much is expected as prohibited if you are the only son of the Marble family. In addition to all the trials of a talented, creative youth born in a small but ancient American town, Leo also struggles with his attraction to other boys.

His journey takes him to Sewanee in the mid-1960s, and then to New Orleans as a journalist when the gay community in the city is beginning to tackle political backlash and high profile oppression. The tenderness with which the whole story is personalized makes this novel such a powerful read.

Julie Liddell Whitehead has long been a freelance journalist in Mississippi, and she is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Mississippi University for Women. Hurricane Baby: Stories is a collection of interlocking tales in which four couples from Mississippi and Louisiana experience jolting but very different traumas during Hurricane Katrina. Most powerfully it is the aftermath, the trauma of courage and action that propels these stories. This is what I said in my blurb to the book:

“If you lived through Hurricane Katrina, these stories by Julie Whitehead will set your pulse racing and flood you with adrenaline. Filled with jarring reality, plain-spoken truths, soulful yearnings, outright fear, courage and its traumatic aftermath, these tales must not be binged but marveled at, one by one. You will not forget them.”

On my second read to get ready to interview Julie when she signs on August 24 at Lemuria right before the anniversary of Katrina, I’m even more firmly convinced: this book is a wonder of drama and human feeling, agony, healing, and the difficulty of redemption.

What wonderful company I will be in this fall promoting these three books together!

My fellow Madvillians, Onward!