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 | | AP | | Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer shown at a lecture entitled 'The 20th Century on Trial' at the New York Public Library on June 27, 2007. |
by Glynn Wilson
It is hard to believe Norman Mailer is dead.
I just met him in September on a subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and I had planned on writing him a long letter after studying the Harper's magazine article that became the Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night.
The article, The Steps of the Pentagon, and the book, deals with a protest march on the Pentagon in Washington Mailer was sent to cover as a journalist for Harper's, edited at that time by Willie Morris of Mississippi, the youngest editor in the storied magazine's history.
While other practitioners of "New Journalism" such as George Plimpton, Truman Capote (an Alabama native), Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese (who attended the University of Alabama) were pioneering the non-fiction novel, also referred to as "creative non-fiction" or "literary journalism," Mailer uses the occasion of the protest march and his arrest and night spent in jail to do his own version of self-portrait, taking off on the Vietnam War. But since Morris had his doubts about the use of first person in the magazine, Mailer wrote the piece in the third person, referring to himself as the protagonist.
Now anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper or a magazine knows that there are few editors who will allow a writer to use first person to place himself in the story, since that flies in the face of the economic definition of objectivity used by American news organizations. But using the third person is even more rare, although Mailer, being the combative, controversial and outspoken character that he was, not only got away with it. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a result and has been praised for it by the likes of the New York Times, which says in the lead to his feature obituary today that Mailer "loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation."
NYT: Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84
The Associated Press is also leading it's AP A wire this morning with Mailer's obit.
AP: Norman Mailer Dead at Age 84
And you can learn more from this free online encyclopedia entry on Mailer.
Wikipedia: Norman Mailer
Here's my story on meeting him, which I never ran before now because I was not positively sure it was him. Now that I see the AP photo of him from earlier this year, however, there's no doubt it was him.
On A Personal Encounter With Norman Mailer
After following Jill Simpson to Washington, D.C. to be there for her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in the political prosecution of Don Siegelman, I decided to make the four hour trek to New York and spend a few days there on my extended fall trip this year.
(You can read more about that trip from the September archives.)
The plan was to run into a former protégé of mine from my time in the master's program at the University of Alabama in the mid-1990s who lives in Brooklyn. And the plan was to meet in person with Scott Horton of Harper's magazine blog fame and Joe Conason at The Nation Institute to further cement my relationship with them on covering big stories out of the American South.
I crossed into Manhattan after sundown on Monday, Sept. 17, and got into Brooklyn in time for some food, beer (and a special Coney Island refreshment) before crashing for the night in a basement apartment in an old Jewish neighborhood not far from where Mailer was born and raised.
The next day, I called up Scott Horton and arranged to meet him at the Union Station Oyster Bar for an appetizer and a few glasses of wine. We talked about the Siegelman case, Jill Simpson and the funny state of Alabama, and then I got back on the subway for the 30 to 40 minute ride back to Brooklyn.
As I sat in the back of a subway car and looked out the window over the East River at the Statue of Liberty off in the distance, I noticed four old men just a few seats in front of me laughing and talking and having a good time. One of them looked exactly like the photograph on this page, and I began to study his face. Could it really be Norman Mailer?
I had started up a conversation with an attractive, exotic young woman and hated to interrupt it, but I just had to know for sure if I was riding the subway with Norman Mailer. So I asked her: "Do you think that could possibly be him?"
She had no idea who I was talking about, so I got out of my seat, approached the man, and asked: "Are you Norman Mailer?"
I immediately felt a little guilty, since I hate it when I see and hear stories about tourists approaching famous people and bugging them in public. He did not answer right away, but smiled and looked at his compatriots. I looked at them too and mouthed the words: "Is this him?" The one who made the most eye contact with me glanced at Mailer to make sure he was not looking and gave me a little wink and a nod in the affirmative.
I tried to get a conversation started by telling them that I was a visiting writer from Alabama who was a big fan of Mailer and Willie Morris, thinking that might get him to open up and talk to me.
In fact, I mentioned that I had recently taken a trip to Oxford, Mississippi where David Rae Morris had a show in a gallery there with many pictures of his dad Willie Morris.
(You can read my column on that trip here: Escaping Shadows: The South as a Backdrop for Art).
Instead of engaging me, Mailer started speaking Yiddish and making a joke with his buddies, probably about my Southern accent and knowing I would not be able to understand a word they were saying. I was still not 100 percent sure it was him, sitting there holding a walking cane and a folding chair.
I just stood there holding onto the silver pole in the subway car listening to them cut up, but when their jibberish slowed down and then took a long pause, I asked the man I thought was Mailer what he did.
"What do I do?" he said with a New York accent, looking right at my face good for the first time, almost angrily.
Then, looking down at the chair he was clutching in his old, wrinkled hands, then back up at me with a smile and a remarkable twinkle in his old blue eyes, he said, "Mostly I sit."
"Sit?" I asked, joining in the fun. "Where do you like to sit? And what do you do while you are sitting?"
"I sit down on Broadway and watch the girls walk by," he said, cracking up his friends.
It had been a beautiful fall day for sitting outside and watching people, so it made perfect sense.
The men kept on speaking in Yiddish and joking around and I figured I had interrupted their fun enough, so I said good night and went back to my seat in the back of the car by the exotic young woman.
When I got back to Alabama, I looked up Mailer in Wikipedia and in the Harper's magazine archives and read "The Steps of the Pentagon." It was then that I realized what Mailer had accomplished writing about himself in the third person.
Like Truman Capote or Hunter S. Thompson, I am more comfortable writing in first person, but the style of journalism is often the same. A writer who places himself in the action of the story goes beyond mere objective journalism and is able to construct a more readable and complete narrative coverage of events. And that is what this Web site is often dedicated to doing.
Le׳hitra׳ot, Norman Mailer. You were a great American character. You will be missed.
By Ronald Sitton
 LITTLE ROCK (Sept. 17) - Dubbed the "Kings of Little Rock Honky-tonk" by local musician Kevin Kerby, The Salty Dogs are promoting their new album "Autoharpoon," a 12-song compilation of new and used cuts that fits like your favorite T-shirt.
The band's second full-length offering provides another welcome reprieve from the slicked-up Nashville sound dominating the country music airwaves. Brad Williams provides lead vocals, plays lead guitar, acoustic guitar and mandolin, and writes the vast majority of tunes played by The Salty Dogs. Bart Angel plays drums and percussion, pairing with Mike Nelson on bass to form a formidable rhythm section. Local legend Nick Devlin rounds out the quartet on electric guitar, lap steel and autoharp. Angel and Devlin often provide backing vocals.
An independent label out of Colorado that that focuses on traditional country, country rock and a couple of bluegrass bands, Big Bender Records picked up The Salty Dogs in February, providing full distribution so that country music fans can grab the album at Best Buy, Sam Goody's and iTunes. Of course, the album can also be found on the band's Web site and MySpace page, or by e-mailing Miles of Music.
However, don't think the band intends to change to attract the major record labels.
"I think if the opportunity came available where we could do something else, we'd have to think about it long and hard," Williams says. "I don't see us beating any doors down (to land a contract from a major label)."
Reinventing an old sound
Described anywhere from "Grand Ole Opry-style Country" to "a natural heir to the Bakersfield Sound" to "Traditional Country & Western with a hip flavor," the band reminds listeners of how good country music could be before Garth Brooks and others turned the genre into a pop-music playground. Yet, some critics of The Salty Dogs contend the band's influences are too apparent.
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| Courtesy of The Salty Dogs |
| On Stage - Brad Williams (left) and Nick Devlin (right) perform during the Memorial Day Weekend. |
"The hardest thing to do is to do anything simple," Angel says. "It's a lot harder to make this sound new and fresh. I'm not sure how far to get away from the Bakersfield Sound without becoming a completely different band or Nashville act. If you want to stay traditional country, you've got to stay traditional country. What do we do, put a tuba in the band?"
Williams agrees.
"I don't see how a band cannot reflect its influences," he says. "Someone's subjective view will compare to something else."
Williams should know, as he's often accused of mimicking Dwight Yoakam (though he doesn't wear the skin-tight jeans). Yoakam faced similar criticisms from people who thought he sounded too much like Buck Owens when singing the Kentucky bluegrass sound.
"I think ultimately it's a compliment," Williams says. "I do respect Dwight Yoakam. In the same sense, it's not that you're trying an impersonating act."
"I'm tired of hearing it," Angel interjects. "I'm sure you are."
"That's a lot of people's frame of reference," Williams continues. "I take it with a grain of salt. You do want to be known for what you do."
Williams notes his influences came from the bluegrass and gospel music he heard growing up in Marked Tree, where he was raised listening to Ralph Stanley, Bill Monroe, Jimmy Williams and Sun Studio artists including Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.
"Every time I write a song, I write it as a bluegrass tune," he says, somewhat to the surprise of Angel. "To write a pop song, it's hard for me to do."
Williams' songwriting skills might be genetic. His grandfather, Roy Wagner, passed away in the '80s, but not before he had written a bunch of songs, some funny and some with a Gospel influence. Williams found the words to "Holding to my Lord" and wrote the accompanying music. His mother, Virginia Williams, provides background vocals on the track that appears on "Autoharpoon."
"I know it means a lot to her and a lot to me," he says. "We have three generations in the song."
The opening track, "Starting now," features Elvis' drummer, D.J. Fontana, known for his instantly recognizable intro to "Jailhouse Rock." Williams contacted Fontana and asked if he'd be interested in recording.
"(Fontana) said, 'Let's do it,' and set aside a date," Williams says. "We went to Nashville with a friend to record it. After two run-throughs, he knocked it out. He was in and out in an hour."
Not that Angel needs to worry about losing his place in the band. Though he grew up listening to Kiss and Cheap Trick on his own and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings through his parents, he owns a peculiar style in that he stands to play his drum kit. While his kit may not be as big as Johnny Cash's drummer, W.S. Holland, Angel still gets a full sound.
Cash's influence can be felt in a few different ways. Williams' family would often talk with the Man in Black when he came back to Marked Tree in Northeast Arkansas' cotton country. The band dedicated its first full-length album, "The Salty Dog and Friends," to Cash.
The new album features a song, "When my blood runs cold," that emulates the Cash sound. The Salty Dogs recorded the song for the soundtrack of a Kelly Duda documentary about Cummins Prison, where Cash played in the early 1970s.
"Autoharpoon" also showcases the vocal talents of Devlin on Mickey Newberry's "Why you've been gone so long?" (the song made famous by Johnny Darrell). One of two cover tunes on the album, the song often appears in The Salty Dogs' live show, as does Steve Davis' "Take time to know her," made famous by Percy Sledge.
"We play it off the cuff," Williams says. "I thought it was a great addition to the record. It's still one of my favorite songs."
In an effort to keep reinventing the music, Nelson adds synthesizers to a few tunes, much to the chagrin of some critics. Williams scoffs at their queasiness.
"This record is still staying true to country music, but trying to think outside the box," he says. "I don't think it changed the style of music."
Branching Out
| | Courtesy of The Salty Dogs |
| The Salty Dogs - (left to right) Brad Williams, Bart Angel, Mike Nelson and Nick Devlin. |
Williams, Angel and Nelson also play in Big Silver, which Williams describes as "Beatles post-Rubber Soul." Between the two bands and some occasional back-up duty for singer-songwriter Amy Garland, each knows what the other will do in almost any situation.
"We get kind of rougher pop with (Big Silver) and traditional country with (The Salty Dogs)," Angel says. "It's kind of a blessing. I approach the three situations differently. It's nice -- as a drummer, I have to approach them differently. It's nice to do that stuff."
Those who've followed the band know that it started as "a lark" to enter The Arkansas Times' Musician Showcase. Big Silver won the showcase in 2000 and The Easys, a pop-rock band led by Big Silver's Isaac Alexander, took the title the next year. Williams and company decided to do "something directly opposite, over-the-top country" in 2003 to make fun of themselves.
"We put together enough songs for a 30-minute set list," Williams says. "We kind of played the role as much as possible, including wearing too much cologne."
According to Angel, guitarist/vocalist Chris Lipsmeyer came up with the name "The Salty Dogs."
"He was going to be a member, but life in general sidetracked him," Angel says. "We kept the name though he didn't stay with us."
As fate would have it, The Salty Dogs won the Arkansas Times Musician's Showcase, the accompanying recording opportunity and the moniker, "Best Original Band in Arkansas." They made an EP, "King of Broken Hearts," and could have been content stopping there. But they enjoyed playing country music more than they realized.
"I don't consider it to be a lark now," Williams says. "I don't think anybody would consider it that. I don't think we have the same motive as during the Times' showcase."
Angel agrees that the band started taking its task more seriously following "The Salty Dogs and Friends," which featured guest appearances from some of their favorite musicians and friends in the Little Rock music community. He credits the continued improvement to Williams' songwriting.
"The more he writes, the better he gets," Angel says. "One of the things people say, we're playing this music that's old in a sense, but we keep it fresh and inject new energy."
The Salty Dogs have opened for Junior Brown, Moot Davis, Hank Williams Jr., Pete Anderson, the Gourds, Old Crow Medicine Show, David Rawlings and the Legendary Shack Shakers. Their rise into the country music consciousness means most shows are played at night, which made their "unofficial" album release at North Little Rock’s William F. Laman's Public Library that much more interesting.
"Amy Brower was doing a summer concert series at the library," Williams says. "She thought it would be cool if we did it. It was a good show. It was a venue where people actually listened and it was the first time we played the new songs. It was pretty cool."
"Brad brought a bubble machine," Angel interjects. "I thought that was kind of cool."
"My daughter got to come to the show," Williams says.
"We got home at a decent hour," Angel adds.
The Whitewater Tavern hosted the official release party. Compared to the library gig, the official release party did not start on time and featured a lot more people and about three times the sound, Williams says. Dan McCorison, a singer/songwriter from Nashville, opened the show with Devlin. All in all, the result was the same: happy people listening to quality country music with good lyrics and little pretentiousness.
If anybody's wondering if The Salty Dogs accept tips at their shows, they do. And they prefer Old Spice cologne.
Catch The Salty Dogs live at the Old State House Museum with Charlotte Taylor on Oct. 4.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2007 Little Rock Free Press.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | David Rae Morris in front of the Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi and the image of his father, the writer Willie Morris. |
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again... Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal… This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- William Faulkner, from Lion in the Garden, 1968.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
OXFORD, Miss., July 28 – Like overcoming our fears in life, escaping shadows is something we all must face - or die trying.
Driving across the landscape of northwest Alabama out of the shadow of Birmingham's dark past and into the light of a place in Mississippi known for its literary giants, who cast shadows of their own for others to escape, it is the shadow of the South itself I long to escape. It may sound funny, but the only way I know how to do that these days is to drive a Chevy van with a canoe on top from one part of the South to another in search of stories and pictures.
 | | Photo by Dave Stueber | | Writer Glynn Wilson at the grave of William Faulkner in St. Peter's Cemetary in Oxford, Mississippi. |
It is hard to get away when some fortune teller long ago said, and she turned out to be right so far: "You will always be tied to this region, in spite of all your efforts to escape."
Elvis Presley escaped by picking up a guitar and singing his way into history, although like a lot of us, he never really left.
The writer Willie Morris escaped by going off to school in Oxford, England and by going to New York, as all great American writers have done in the past. Morris regretted never having met Elvis, even though they were about the same age and both from Mississippi.
For David Rae Morris, an artist and photographer with indelible ties to this place even though you get the feeling he would like to escape it, his ultimate search for escape has been in some ways like the journey of the children of Elvis Presley, the attempted escape from a famous personage, his father.
Although in David Rae's case, the shadow of Willie Morris the writer and teacher is not so towering as the shadow of the King of Rock 'n' Roll, who is known by so many people across the globe that the shotgun house of his birth in nearby Tupelo, Mississippi, along with the museum and chapel built there, stays busy year around.
So David Rae's journey seems to have been as technically if not emotionally as easy as a lazy float down the Mississippi River into New Orleans. At least that's where he found a city to call home that almost compared to the one he was born in, London, and the one he was raised in and would always judge other cities by, New York.
But it may very well be that the town where he is most accepted and welcome is Oxford, Mississippi, also known as the "Little Easy," where the descendants of the people who knew William Faulkner knew Willie Morris better than anywhere else, including those in his home town of Yazoo, Mississippi.
Many of the photographs on display at the Southside Gallery on Oxford's town circle, also known by locals as the "center of the universe," show Willie Morris here, in black and white. Walking with his dog Pete, pointing a drunken finger at his son holding the camera, posing by Faulkner's grave or gazing into the Southern horizon, the images show an extraordinary and contradictory man mostly past his prime.
Yet he seems content in his Southerness, more at home at the University of Mississippi teaching writing than he claims to have been in New York in the 1960s as the youngest editor in the history of Harper's magazine in its heyday.
So what was it like to be the son of Willie Morris before he died in September, 1999? Who was this man who cast such a shadow over his son that it took him almost eight years after his death to address the world on the question in black and white?
"Which Willie Morris," David Rae asks, looking around at the photographs. It is, to be sure, a broad and general question that begs for an abstraction, not a concrete answer, about a man with a multi-faceted personality.
The photographs are part of the exhibit “Willie and Katrina,” on display at the Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi from July 9 to August 4. The second half of the show, which is overshadowed by the enduring images of Willie Morris, show the devastation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, America's worst ever natural disaster.
While Willie was alive, David Rae says he never really saw his father as major subject of his work. One of the most enduring images in the show, the one used on the invitation, shows Willie walking with his dog Pete in the cemetery where Faulkner is buried. It was taken while the young photographer was trying to figure out how to shoot abstract, art photographs of cemeteries.
"I didn't think much of it at the time," David Rae says. "But now it knocks my socks off."
It must have taken awhile after his father's death for David Rae to be able to deal with the idea that he was in possession of a series of interesting images of an important literary figure. Going back and finding the photographs and putting the show together must have been somewhat cathartic.
"I'm happy now I have the pictures," he says.
Later, at the opening party after the gallery reception, I tried again to find out more about the father-son relationship, setting it up with the story of what I remember of my own father who died at the age of 47 when I was only 15.
Was he a strict Southern father like mine or more lassie faire?
"He would tell me what he thought," he said. "But he would always be supportive of me, no matter what I did. He was supportive, but I was always trying to get out from under that shadow."
Always curious about politics, I had to ask about Willie's. I know David Rae's from all the time spent talking about it over Friday lunches at the Rendon Inn in Mid-City New Orleans during the four years I spent there. And it's not much different from his dad's.
According to his self-portrait in the memoir New York Days, Willie Morris called himself a "Jefferson Democrat."
"He would absolutely hate George Bush," David Rae said. "He loved Bill Clinton."
And I suspect he would have railed against Alberto Gonzales and the way he has run the Bush Justice Department.
Since Willie was known as practical joker and to be something of a party animal, a fun-loving drinker, I asked David Rae why he does not imbibe. He quit drinking a few years ago, he said, "Because it was the best thing for me."
Maybe that was part of getting out from under that shadow, a shadow that may have contributed to causing his father to lose out on a longer stint at the Big Time in New York, although you won't read that in any of the official biographies.
He left Harper's because of an age-old story in the media business: New owners more interested in higher profits, not necessarily in funding the creation of art, literature - or great new journalism.
It may say something that he ended up in Oxford and died at the same age as Faulkner.
Townsfolk and university people sometimes repeat the town's unofficial motto, "We may not win every game, but we ain't never lost a party."
The university's most enduring cheer in football season goes:
Hotty Toddy gosh almighty,
who in the Hell are we?
Hey! Flim flam bim bam
Ole Miss by damn!”
Although in an anomaly of history, and one of the few knocks on the place I could find, is the fact that cold beer is not sold in Oxford. It is said the former mayor owned the ice company and no one has bothered to try to change the ordinance.
Oxford, in Lafayette County, lies in the rolling hills of North Mississippi about 80 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. The primary employer and central to the area's character and economy is the University of Mississippi, affectionately known as "Ole Miss." The town and the county served as the inspiration for Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner's fictional Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha county.
The small town is widely known for its Southern charm, Old South feel, party atmosphere, and of course its beautiful women, which even Hugh Hefner of Playboy called "the finest in the world," according to the Wikipedia entry on the town. I can attest to the truth of that statement after just a few hours hanging out in Oxford and looking around, even in the middle of summer when most of the college coeds are away at the beach or back home at the pool.
The place is also considered a major literary center, and it is often said that everyone in town is "a lawyer, a writer or both." Famous author John Grisham still owns a house here.
Willie was not a lawyer, but he was a rebel, and one of the most important writers to come out of Mississippi and spend considerable time in Oxford.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | William Faulkner's house at Rowan Oak, the writer's estate just blocks from the courthouse circle in Oxford, Mississippi. |
I think, like a lot of writers, Willie Morris tried to live by something Faulkner said in his speech to the Nobel Prize committee. He said a writer "must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."
According to a woman in town named Milly who knew him, "Willie lived the way he wanted to live."
If any of his friends had tried to say something to change that, according to David Rae, "They would have been banned from the inner circle" of folks who got to hang around with Willie.
Maybe that's important for all of us to remember, to live like we want to live.
Elvis surely did it and died too young of a drug overdose. In New York Days, Willie describes Elvis as the biggest Southern rebel of them all.
"Elvis Presley was a revolutionary from Tupelo," he writes. "In Elvis the incipient young white rebels found an early expression more subversive by far than Kerouac, Ginsberg … and all the beatniks."
Writing for Southern Magazine in 1986, not long after returning to his native state from New York, Morris wrote: "There is much of the South … I wish I could escape forever." Chief among them, he said, lay "…every manifestation of institutionalized, right-wing, fundamentalist religion, richer and more pervasive than it ever was. To escape the South, however - all of what it was and is - I would have to escape from myself."
Maybe David Rae Morris will never fully escape the shadow of his father, because to do so, he would have to escape from himself.
Maybe I will never escape the South, because that would mean going somewhere I have no frame of reference. As flawed as it is, as backwards and at times downright infuriating, the South is a place with a history that serves as a backdrop for art.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | The house Elvis was born in is now the centerpiece of a museum and shrine to the King of Rock 'n' Roll in Tupelo, Mississippi. |
Award-winning photographer David Rae Morris will present "Willie and Katrina" at the Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi July 9 to Aug. 4.
The first half of the exhibit, "Willie Morris in Oxford," is a series of portraits he took of his late father, the noted writer Willie Morris, in the early 1980s. The second half, "The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina," is a sample of Morris' extensive coverage of the storm and the resulting tragedy that has befallen his adopted city of New Orleans.
Although he evacuated the city two days before Katrina made landfall on August 29th, 2005, Morris returned almost immediately, first to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and then into New Orleans in early September.
"The only way for me to make any sense of what had happened, was to throw myself into my work," Morris said. "New Orleanians are a very resilient bunch. The designers of the levees and flood walls failed us, the federal government has failed us, and our local leaders have failed us. We are truly on our own."
An exhibition of portraits of his father was already on the schedule at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans for the Spring of 2006 when Katrina struck.After almost two years of non-stop coverage of the aftermath of the storm, Morris turned his attention back to the portraits of his father. The majority of the 25 black and white photographs, were made between 1980 and 1985.
"I'm moving from one emotional mine field to another," he said. "There's a lot going on in these photographs. My father had returned home to live in Mississippi after almost 30 years in self-imposed exile, and I was in college and still trying to determine my own direction as a photographer."
At the same time, his relationship with his father was also undergoing a transformation.
"As a young man in my early 20s, I was trying to establish my own independence and I often used the camera as a way of setting new boundaries," he said.
The images range from his father's walks with his beloved black Lab, Pete, behind William Faulkner's house, Rowan Oak, to driving in the country, to staying up late with friends at his new house at 16 Faculty Row on the Ole Miss Campus.
A reception will be held July 26, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. An expanded exhibit of the Morris' portraits of his father entitled "Letters From My Father," will open at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans October 6th, and continue through December 2007.
 | | Willie Morris from North Toward Home |
To see one image, go to: WilliePete.jpg.
Willie Morris and The Southerner magazine
When Southern American writer Willie Morris died on Aug. 2, 1999, at the age of 64, I was the editor and publisher of a new online magazine called The Southerner at Southerner.Net. We put out a special issue on Morris with some of the top writers in the country weighing in on this special character in Southern literary history.
This was the first attempt in the world, as far as we know, to develop a Website that tried to live up to certain standards of a print magazine, down to a cover photo and printable content. The style of it seems sort of antiquated now, although it is an interesting look at the early days of the Web. We even had maybe the first audio file ever linked from a Website, an interview I did with author Gay Talese. You can still listen to it.
If you don't know who Willie Morris is, here's one way to find out.
The Southerner: A Tribute to Willie Morris
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