Storm Season

Last weekend, as well as the obligatory Bank Holiday DIY (painting the bedroom, in case you’re interested) I managed to fit in a bit of work on the book. While going through my note books for the section on Louisiana I’m currently working on, I realised that exactly a year ago I was caught up in a little Southern drama of my own, down in New Orleans.

Now, the Crescent City is a favourite destination of mine – I was bewitched by her spell many years ago. It was wandering this city, tracing the footsteps, and bar tabs of so many literary greats that first gave me the idea for the book. But, while famous the world over for a rich and thriving culture – the impressive literary heritage, the toe-tapping jazz and the taste bud-zinging, life affirming (if not always life-prolonging) cuisine, New Orleans is also known for her extreme weather.

Hurricanes can come off the Gulf of Mexico any time from June to December, though the season generally peaks in late August through September. During these months, any local or frequent visitor knows to acquaint themselves with Margaret Orr’s nightly forecast, and to get really concerned when CNN’s Anderson Cooper arrives in his waterproofs, closely followed by national news teams booking up rooms at The Royal Sonesta in the Quarter, its sturdy iron balconies perfect for storm-whipped pieces to camera.

Being in New Orleans during the late summer months, where daily temperatures hover in the 90ies really allows you to get a feel for the sass and sizzle that drips from the pages of Southern literature.  Just as the tension and heat in Southern storytelling simmers and swirls, building slowly to boiling point, suddenly giving  way to the inevitable almighty crescendo of a  storm, so too does the local climate.

I’ve visited my beloved Big Easy at many different times throughout the year, most recently in March for the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival. But for me, it is those long, lazy, last days of summer that I love best.

Until last year, I’d always been very lucky with the weather. Other than a few tense hours on the I- 55 between McComb and Jackson, Mississippi in the company of tropical storm Lee, I’d only ever experienced the occasional unexpected downpour. So, last August, when a slow moving tropical cyclone named Isaac first started to cause concern in the Caribbean, I reacted accordingly: I kept up with the weather forecast, kept an eye out for Mr Anderson and carried on with my trip.

When Isaac hit the Gulf of Mexico a few days later, it was reclassified as a hurricane; seemingly one with an interest in American politics. Initial tracking systems predicted that it was headed straight for the Republican National Convention, being held in Florida later that week. I still wasn’t overly concerned. I listened to the TV news discussions on whether the RNC should and could be cancelled so close to an election and watched report after report on the hike in the price of Florida orange juice. I met up with friends who had flown in from Jupiter, Florida for a few days and listened in a bustling bar on Bourbon St as they described storm-proofing their home before leaving.

That evening we were joined by friends from Texas, and for the next couple of days, in gloriously hot sunshine we all set about putting New Orleans’ motto – Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler, into action.

Then Isaac changed his mind. He wasn’t heading for Florida after all, but was now making a beeline for the Louisiana coastline. Newscasters nervously noted similarities with the path of Hurricane Katrina. Though now downgraded to a tropical storm, meteorologists predicted that when Isaac made landfall, it would do so as a category 2 hurricane. That was, they said, likely to happen the day after tomorrow, August 27^th. One day shy of Katrina’s seventh anniversary.

My phone pinged with a message from my friend Ken, a local who knows a thing or two about hurricanes. As a volunteer with the Red Cross, he’s stared down several, including Katrina.

‘Not to alarm you too much’   began the message. Uh-oh I thought.

‘I think you’d better at least start considering evacuation plans. This is a big storm.

I’ll be evacuating to the (Red Cross) Northshore offices, setting up shelters. So if you can’t get out, then you can ride with me up to Madisonville and stay at a Red Cross shelter there.’

Sandbags and storm shutters at The Historic New Orleans Collection

Calls were made in the hope of changing flights. The lines were jammed. When I finally got through, I was told that all flights that day and the next were fully booked, but that extra departures were being scheduled. I was placed on a waiting list with a promise of phone call to confirm my seat within the next hour.

I still had appointments to keep, this was after all a work trip, so I headed into the Quarter where I’d arranged to meet one of Tennessee Williams’ old poker playing pals for coffee. We sipped and chatted as the café owner hammered hurricane shutters into place over the windows. As he dragged sandbags towards the doorway he told us that he was heading up to Baton Rouge later that evening to ‘sit out the storm at my sister’s place.’

‘Oh, I’m gonna hunker down here’ said my companion.

‘I’ve got my generator and enough groceries. And anyhow, my cat hasn’t been fussing so much about this one.’

I must have looked a little bemused.

‘Oh yes, she was just about crazy before Katrina came. Animals sure have a sense for these things.

You know, right before Katrina, I heard the lizards at the zoo escaped. As far as I know there are no missing reptiles today.’

Gridlock on the I- 10

Walking back to my hotel, the deserted rues of the Vieux Carre gave me an uneasy feeling. Louisiana’s Governor had declared a state of emergency. Some of the bars on Bourbon had flyers taped to their boarded-up windows advertising storm parties that night. When the airline finally called to tell me I’d be on the last flight to Charlotte, North Carolina the following evening, I was passing the speedboat used to make over 600 rescues in the aftermath of Katrina, now anchored on dry land outside the Presbytere on Jackson Square.

The following morning the hotel manager pushed a note under my door to say that they planned to remain open, but once Isaac hit there would be no electricity, water or staff other than himself and a deputy on site. It was time to leave.

Getting to airport wasn’t easy. The roads leaving the city were gridlocked. Though many residents were taking their chances and staying put, many more, or so it seemed, were spending long hours sitting in their SUVs surrounded by their most treasured possessions.

‘Not joining them?’  I asked my taxi driver, nodding towards the cars surrounding us on the I- 10.

‘Naw honey. These types a things, you jus’ gotta learn how to do things your own way.’

With both a heavy heart and total relief I boarded my flight. As the plane took off into a blue-grey brooding sky, I also felt a sense of guilt. As if I were abandoning a friend in need.

Isaac did his worst. Homes were devastated and people lost their lives. New Orleans, as always, picked herself up and got on with the job of recovery.

Remembering the events of last year, I emailed my friend Ken.

‘It’s hot, humid and rainy here’ he replied

‘But that’s New Orleans in August!’

The calm before the storm. Leaving New Orleans, August 27th 2012

At Home With Zelda

This week Baz Luhrmann’s bold, bright and brash re-working of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby bursts on to cinema screens here in the UK. In bookshops, the author’s iconic wife – Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is also getting plenty of attention, as no less than three new works of fiction and a graphic novel about her are published this month.

Mrs Fitzgerald fascinates me. The Southern belle who grew up to be the Queen of the Jazz Age; the muse of many and mistress to her husband’s demons. Adored by an emerging generation of flappers and despised by her husband’s lit- set, she struggled for a creative identity of her own. At thirty, she suffered her first nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Never fully to recover, she spent the rest of her life in and out of institutions. She died tragically in a hospital fire aged just forty seven.

Back in 2011, when I started to research my book, my husband and I embarked on a colossal literary pilgrimage through the Deep South. After catching up with friends and the haunts of Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta, our first stop on the tour- proper was Montgomery, Alabama; birthplace of Zelda and one time home to America’s first ‘It’ couple. 

The Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery, AL

Top of my Montgomery itinerary was a visit to the F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum – a literary and artistic treasure trove tucked away amongst the winding wisteria and neatly manicured lawns of the city’s Garden District. It was here I met museum director, Willie Thompson.

 A few weeks ago, when I came to write an article on the renewal of interest in Zelda for the Wales Arts Review, as well as speaking to two of the authors of the recent releases, I knew I had to take the story back to Zelda’s beginning, and to the curator of her legacy. You can read that article – ‘Gatsby’s Gal: The Reinvention of Zelda Fitzgerald’ here.

And here is my interview with F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum director Willie Thompson in full.

Scott and Zelda are one of the most important “literary” couples America ever boasted.  That Montgomery, Alabama is home to the only museum in the world dedicated to preserving their memory is unusual – seeing as Scott, who was the more prolific artist of the two, was from St. Paul, Minnesota. But Zelda’s pre-eminence in Montgomery and her popularity in the state (especially among the young servicemen of WWI) while she was still in high school, coupled with the fact that her family was one of the most prominent families here when she and Scott met, as well as the fact that the museum exists in the last house that they lived in in together – justifies the location. The story started here, and it continues to be remembered here.

The museum is host to the world’s second largest collection of Zelda’s paintings (the largest being with her family) Aside from first-editions and various manuscripts of many of their works, we have a great deal of minutia, including Zelda’s long-stemmed cigarette holder, original photographs of the couple throughout the course of their lives, various “flapper” ornaments that Zelda created: painted-perfume bottles, marble-topped tables from the Sayre household, letters between the famous couple, as well as letters to their daughter Scottie and to Hemingway.  The house, however, is the most important artefact.  This is where Scott and Zelda hoped to “settle” and it is the last house they lived in together before Zelda’s long bout with mental illness throughout the 30s.

In honour of the Halloween Party that Zelda threw for Scottie here in October 1931, we host one of our own every year.  Although we don’t buy the town out of kite twine to create an enormous spider web out of the house and yard as Zelda did, we do play off a 20’s theme.  We also have a Christmas Open house, where we try to bring in a prominent speaker or author, and we celebrate Zelda’s birthday every July 24th.  Our largest party, however, is our Annual Gala and Auction, which occurs in the first week of March every year.  It’s a giddy affair.  Last winter we had over 300 guests – all dressed in their flapper best – two bands, three bars, and a whole lot of tom-foolery.  It’s grand.

Of all the other countries in the world, Italians and the French are the most interested in Scott and Zelda.  But Europe doesn’t have a monopoly on international interest in the ‘Jazz Age darlings.’  Every year we have visitors from every continent, and we’re seeing a large increase in Australians this year. We haven’t done any clinical research, but it might have something to do with the new Gatsby movie. Our head count is more than double what it was in the first quarter of last year.

I’ve personally never met anyone who knew Scott and Zelda as a couple, but I’ve met several who knew Zelda in the 1940s (they were children at the time).  Scott and Zelda’s daughter, Scottie, had many friends in Montgomery.  Unfortunately, there are few left.  Scottie’s best friend in Montgomery, Dodgy Schaeffer who accompanied Scottie to Paris on several occasions, to revisit places from her childhood passed away on this last year.

Partly due to her upbringing, her genetic predisposition to mental illness, to Scott’s literary prominence, and partly due to her own refusal to “act normal,” Zelda failed to reach the artistic professionalism she was capable of in her own time period.  I do think we’re seeing people who want to help her reach it now.  Personally, I find it a little strange.  Zelda was one of the most popular celebrities of her day (until mental illness struck), so I have a hard time calling it a “revival.”  A “revisiting” might be more like it.  If Zelda had been able to produce more substantial work of literary or artistic merit, I don’t think you’d see as many fictionalizations as you have of her life today.  Scott’s not getting that sort of treatment.  But the early twentieth century certainly wasn’t an easy time to be a prominent female, so maybe it’s warranted that authors are taking her side.  What’s good for either Scott or Zelda is good for their legacy, but I find it hard to focus on one without the other.

A Day in Hay

Being a self-confessed travel addict doesn’t always manifest itself in an uncontrollable urge to dash, passport in hand, to the nearest airport check in. It does however, require a sense of adventure, a full tank of petrol and a patient husband who is amenable to that inevitable mid-week question – “We’re not busy this weekend are we? Because I was thinking we could go to…”

 

Richard Booth’s Book Shop

Fortunately for me, the other half has always had a bit of an Indiana Jones complex, he is after all finishing up a Masters in Regional History. Though it must be said our adventures are more picnic in the park than Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I’m extremely lucky too that we live in a beautiful part of the world – filled with rich pickings fit for the most intrepid of explorers.

Just an hour away is the town of Hay- on-Wye, the world’s first, and most famous book town.  This small village, nestled on the border between Wales and England is the world’s largest second hand and antiquarian book centre, home to over 40 book shops, equating to a biblio-licious average of 1 bookshop per 36 residents. It is also host to the world-renowned Hay Literature Festival, dubbed by Bill Clinton as the ‘Woodstock of the Mind’, and is one of my favourite places to while away a weekend, trawling through its literary treasure troves.

No matter what your reading tastes are – you’re well served in Hay. From specialist bookshops,

such as The Hay Cinema Bookshop and the deliciously dark Murder and Mayhem- purveyors of crime and horror novels, to the fabulous Richard Booth’s Books – which lays claim to the coveted (well in this village, anyway) title of world’s largest second hand bookshop, there really is something for everyone. It is almost impossible to leave the town without an armful of books.

Over the years, I’ve had some great finds in Hay. Among them a dog-eared first edition of Truman Capote’s ‘A House on the Heights’ and my favourite so far – a first edition of Tennessee Williams’ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, found in a dusty box at the back of one of the smaller shops, complete with the cast list from the London Comedy Theatre’s 1958 production of the play, starring Kim Stanley as Maggie (also known for her role as narrator in the 1962 film version of To Kill A Mockingbird) hidden inside.

1955 First Edition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with 1958 London Comedy Theatre cast list

My latest visit this weekend didn’t disappoint. After a day scrutinising the shelves, I am now the proud owner of Penguin first edition copies of Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.

Indiana also managed to purchase the equivalent of his own bodyweight in various history books. Happy shoppers indeed. The only problem now is finding more space on our creaking bookshelves.

Bohemian Rhapsody

This article was first publised in Deep South Magazine in August 2012

“Let me guess,” said my fiance in a tone dancing between joke and sarcasm. “Tennessee Williams used to buy his souvenirs here in this very store.”

Handing me the red and gold carnival mask he’d been waving for dramatic effect, he stepped back into the sunshine of Royal Street, rustling the rainbow of Mardi Gras beads and feather boas hanging in the gift shop doorway. It’s true what they say – New Orleans is full of drama.

I couldn’t blame my other half for feeling a little, how shall we say … exasperated. This was our first visit to the Crescent City, and the experience so far wasn’t quite as either of us had expected. We’d been here a little over three hours and I’d walked us to the corner of Royal and St. Peter for the third time in that short space to gawp at the broken, shuttered windows of a badly dilapidated (surely) derelict townhouse.

A bronze plaque still pinned, but no longer proud, to its flaking wall: the words “Avart-Peretti House. During 1946 and 1947 Tennessee Williams lived here and wrote A Streetcar Named Desire.” The writing was barely legible under a thick coating of sticky pink goo.

“Probably a strawberry daiquiri from Bourbon Street,” my fiance muttered, unhelpfully. Frustrated by my apparent lack of interest in the cornucopia of delights on offer all around us, as far as he was concerned, I’d flipped in the Southern heat.

Both on a sabbatical from careers in our native Wales, UK – him in PR and me a television producer – we were halfway through a three-month adventure travelling the States by Amtrak (which is itself another story), when New Orleans was added to the itinerary. It was a place I’d longed to visit since my teens, our thoughts filled with jazz bars and cocktail hours that lasted all night. But something happened during the taxi ride from the station that altered the focus of our visit, something from which I doubt I’ll ever recover.

As the cab lurched left off Canal Street into the banana tree-lined squares and iron lace balconies of the French Quarter, a switch flipped inside me. I’d been here before. Yes, this was my first actual visit to New Orleans, but as the driver navigated the Vieux Carre, I realized I’d roamed its rues, chugged the wide waters of the Mississippi and danced to the city’s intoxicating beat many times already through books, films and music. Stepping from that cab onto the Quarter’s cobbles felt like coming home. My love affair with the Deep South had begun.

Several years have passed since that first visit. The fiance has been upgraded to husband, and fortunately, his initial frustration with my sudden attachment to 632 St. Peter St. has long since been replaced by enthusiasm for return visits, of which there have been many. Together we have travelled the states of the South on a literary pilgrimage that has taken us from Hemingway’s Key West to Faulkner’s Oxford and everywhere in between. Each journey filled with newfound friends and amazing experiences: standing in the living room of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s former home in Montgomery, Alabama, now the world’s only museum dedicated to the couple; wandering the summer-scorched sidewalks in Columbus, Georgia, like Carson McCullers’ Mick Kelly in “The Heart is a lonely Hunter,” and following Atticus Finch’s famous advice by walking in the shoes of Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, our guide around the town’s Old Courthouse Museum none other than the cousin of  its other famous export – Truman Capote. (The author is pictured below in front of one of Monroeville’s Mockingbird Murals.)

I always find the time, however, for the place that made these journeys possible, the place where the words of Tennessee Williams and so many more truly came alive to me for the first time.

New Orleans, Faulkner once wrote, is a place “where imagination takes precedence over fact,” and I’m inclined to agree. It is impossible not be swept up in its magic, to conjure up the ghosts of those who’ve left their literary mark on the city. Enjoy a lunchtime libation with Tennessee Williams at Lafitte’s Blacksmith shop, something the author reputedly did every day after a morning’s writing. Lunch with Williams at his favourite table in the window at Galatoire’s, while watching the world go by on Bourbon Street. Take a stroll to Faulkner House Books on Pirate’s Alley, and visit with the young William Faulkner who lived there while writing his first novel, “Soldiers Pay.” Join him as he makes his way to 540 St. Peter St. to attend one of Sherwood Anderson’s legendary literary salons or hop on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar and head for the porches and pillars of the Garden District residences of George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin.

When a sazerac beckons, and one will – head to The Carousel Bar at the Hotel Montelone, where you’ll find the spirit of Truman Capote perched on one of the ornately decorated barstools entertaining Ernest Hemingway with the claim that he was born in the hotel. (He was actually born in nearby Touro Infirmary.)

And that’s barely scratching the surface.

Over the years since I’ve known the city, several more plaques noting places of historic and literary importance have appeared. The ramshackle townhouse where Stanley first cried “Stella!” has had a makeover too; its flaking paint and pink goo are no more. For me, there’s still plenty to discover both here and throughout the Deep South. No matter where the literary trail takes me, I know I’ll always be back to check in on Tennessee Williams’ affectionately named ‘little bohemia.’ Thanks to that first visit to The Big Easy all those years ago, long after each vacation is over, a piece of my heart always remains in the South.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Room with a view

I hate to start this post with a cliché about the climate here in New Orleans, but it has to be said. It is HOT. It’s not just me that thinks so; according  to the meteorological know-how of our cab driver on the way from the airport:

“Phewee! It’s sure hot enough to make a crazy dog clever.”

I’m not entirely sure I understand his logic, though I wholeheartedly share his sentiment.

Hot it may be, but what better way to experience arguably America’s most vibrant city; famed for its sunsoaked days and steamy summer nights. After all, everyone comes here to feel a little Southern sass n’ sizzle.

New Orleans, William Faulkner once wrote, is a place “where imagination takes precedence over fact.” Anyone familiar with the city that care forgot will doubtless agree; the Big Easy is utterly bewitching.

From the moment you set foot in the city, whose motto is ‘Laissez les bon temps rouler’- ‘let the good times roll’, you’re under the spell of its sensory paradise. The sights, sounds, and tastes don’t so much touch you, as grab hold of you, sweep you along on a whirlwind romance and bombard you to breaking point until you’re head over heels in love. Inevitably you return home and the affair is over.

Like all lost loves, New Orleans will haunt your thoughts, teasing and enticing you back for more. I should know; this is my fourth visit in as many years. My thirst for her cocktail of carnival and curios isn’t quenched yet. Yes sir. I’ve got it bad for New Orleans.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one to fall for her charms. The city, in particular its most famous district, Le Vieux Carre or the French Quarter, has seduced generations of travellers and inspired the creative juices of some of America’s greatest authors, leaving her cobbled streets peppered with literary landmarks.

Wander through Pirate’s Alley in the footsteps of one time resident William Faulkner; head to one of Sherwood Anderson’s famed 20th Century literary salons; lunch with Tennessee Williams at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop or join Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway at the Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar for a tall tale and a sazerac.

For me, at least, this is what captures the essence of New Orleans. As Bob Dylan said “The past don’t pass away so quick here.”

Stepping back into the present, sitting here on our hotel balcony under the clickety-clack of a ceiling fan that is elegantly swirling the sounds and smells of the French Quarter evening all around me, I feel like I’m home.

Mockingbirds and the Mythical South

Time for a peach tea pit stop on the I65

This article first appeared in WalesHome in September 2011

It’s hot; suffocatingly hot. I’m already tanking up on a second large glass of iced peach tea, and the Montgomery bus, whose arrival I’m not so patiently awaiting at a kerbside plate-lunch café in Columbus, Georgia won’t be here for another half an hour. My supposed sound reasoning for not hiring a car, and thus my very own personal supply of air-con until Alabama escapes me. Or maybe it’s the heat addling my thoughts. It’s August and the states that make up the Deep South of the USA are collectively sweating their way through record highs. Today the mercury is hovering at the 103 mark, making it the hottest day of the year so far.
Fellow travellers are strewn around the vicinity; top buttons undone, long hair lifted from shoulders, all fanning frantically with large navy blue Greyhound bus tickets. Other than us, the town appears deserted. There’s hardly even a passing car. Next door a mechanic’s neon sign buzzes, flashing intermittently offering friends of Jesus a free brake inspection; opposite a huge billboard asks: “Where are you going- Heaven or Hell? Call 0800 Redemption.”

I’m well and truly below the Mason-Dixon North-South dividing line, in a place of almost unfathomable contrasts. America’s Bible belt it may be, but it is also the birthplace of Jazz, Blues and Rock n Roll. When Cotton and sugar were king, the area’s economy thrived on slave labour; a brutal and bloody civil war that saw the South defeated and its way of life destroyed heralded the abolition of slavery, only for it to be replaced by Jim Crow’s laws of segregation and discrimination. From such injustice came the Civil Rights Movement. Today across the South both histories sit side by side.

The landscape of Dixie is vast and varied also- from Georgia’s pine tree forests, Alabama’s red-clay dusty roads, the lonely, sparsely populated Louisiana swampland to the sweeping infinity of the Mississippi Delta’s cotton fields. Not your average summer holiday itinerary, I grant you; but this land has also proved fertile literary ground, producing some of the world’s most renowned authors and a genre of writing that has captivated me since my teens. This sweltering August afternoon is the beginning of my pilgrimage through the Deep South, in the footsteps of Twain, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee- to name but a few, in search of mockingbirds and a little of Huck and Tom’s Mississippi mischief of my own.

After a journey through the back roads of Georgia where even the bus drivers exude southern charm “Y’all go on right ahead and turn y’alls cell phones on silent. We don’t want to be botherin’ nobody today”, we cross into Alabama. Pines are replaced by a bottle-green overgrown countryside of messy looking woods wrapped in vines. In fact everything here is covered in the plant that I later learn is kudzu, the “mile-a-minute vine”, smothering everything in its path- trees, telegraph poles, old tumbledown houses. The locals say if you stand still long enough- it’ll cover you too. The next stop is Montgomery, both the cradle of the Confederacy and of the Civil rights movement. Here the First White House of the Confederacy (built, incidentally for Confederate President Jefferson Davis, of Welsh descent, whose family crest displayed in the main bedroom there reads ‘Heb Duw heb ddim, Duw a digon’ meaning ‘Without God, without anything. God is enough’) is a two minute stroll from the church where Martin Luther King Junior was pastor; further down the street is the bus stop at which Rosa Parks waited wearily every evening, gazing directly into the windows of  the Winter Building opposite, from where the telegram authorising the Civil War was sent. The museum that honours her is only a few blocks away situated on the same street as the city’s former slave market.

These complexities of the Southern experience have provided inspiration for countless authors. Theirs is a world where niceties are dabbed like sweet talc on a difficult history. Fine Southern manners disguise ugly truths. It is a place known in equal amounts for injustice and for human kindness, for sin and for redemption. People mind their behaviour in company, never miss Church on a Sunday, and do horrible things to each other. This ethos of Southern storytelling can, I’m told be traced back to the early English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh settlers who brought with them the King James Bible and Shakespeare.

“We all grew up knowing those tales,” Randall Williams, co-founder of Montgomery publishing house New South Books tells me. “They were true to life to us, the vast tragedies- we could relate to them.”
We are sitting in the front parlour of the guesthouse I’m staying at in Montgomery’s Garden district, a mere cocktail-olive’s throw away from the house shared for a period in the early 1930ies by Mr & Mrs F Scott Fitzgerald. The community here, as it was back then is a tight one and considering that Montgomery is a city, my arrival has not gone un-noticed. People are keen to come and “visit with” me, to sit and talk about the literary legends that have left their mark here. Mr Williams, a founding director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Klanwatch, and former reporter turned editor now runs New South Books, an independent printing press and bookshop in downtown Montgomery. Although times and attitudes have moved on, the area’s troubled past is never long forgotten- a fact he knows well.

New South Books has during recent months attracted international attention for its new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn which removes the racially offensive ‘n’ word, used in the novel 219 times, replacing it instead with ‘slave’. The changes have come in for stern criticism from academics and readers alike who accuse Randal Williams and the book’s editor, Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of diluting the novel’s anti racist message and of censorship.

Gribben and Williams say conversely that they are attempting to rescue the text, which has been disappearing from the school curriculum due to its racially insensitive language. In the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 banned or challenged books of the past decade, Huckleberry Finn comes in at number 14. This new edition, Randall Williams says, was only intended for use in schools that were facing problems teaching the original text.

“We already publish the original version of the book with the ‘n’ word in there, the new edition is for those places where the book is stopped from being taught” he tells me.

“The 60 Minutes news programme went to a school that teaches the text and asked the kids there how they felt about the word. And one black child in a class of mainly white children said it made him uncomfortable. Well, if we’ve published this book just for that one child- then I’m happy with that.”

Although he admits he was shocked by the worldwide media attention.

“In 1972, as a reporter I covered the assassination attempt on George Wallace (the then controversial pro-segregation Governor of Alabama) In the 1980s when I was the director of Klanwatch, our office was fire-bombed by the Ku-Klux-Klan. Both those things were big media stories, but nothing like the storm that came over the publication of this book.”

I suggest to him it demonstrates that despite the delicate subject matter, Twain’s message remains an important one, which is why the book is still beloved the world over.

“Yes, absolutely” he says “That’s why we want everyone to have the chance of reading it.”

Mark Twain knew a thing or two about the importance of getting the tone just right. “The difference between the right and almost right word”, he famously wrote “is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

Words are certainly important here in the Deep South. And getting it right, it seems, is still as difficult as ever.

Sensible shoes

I guess we’re not in the Departure Lounge anymore Toto…

Hello, and welcome to my new blog. I’m sure you’ve worked out from the title, that it’s here I plan to share my travel tales old and new. I don’t necessarily intend to write 80 posts as the title suggests. There may be more (I can go on a bit), there may be less (I’m easily distracted). We’ll see how I get on.

Also expect a little babbling about my current travel-inspired project – a literary guide to America’s Deep South.

As I mentioned, my posts will be about trips both old and new, giving me a chance to de-clutter my desk drawer of notebook after notebook filled with travelogues dating back over ten years.

Ah, those cherished moments, like the time my best friend and I were almost hurled over a cliff whilst jungle trekking in Northern Thailand by a greedy, non-spatially-aware elephant; or the time my husband befriended a tatooed giant, fresh from a 10 year stint in a notorious California clink within the first hour of our 29 hour train ride from LA to San Antonio, Texas.

You see, it’s not all about rolling waves and sunsets.

I’ll also be writing about my forthcoming travels as I research and write my book. In fact, my husband and I are gearing up for a trip to New Orleans this week. I’m excited to be meeting with a group of Tennessee Williams’ old buddies, from whom I hope to gain some first hand insights into the life of one of the 20th Century’s greatest playwrights. My husband is equally excited about his meetings with bottomless gumbo bowls and afternoon sazeracs on our balcony.

My posts won’t all feature travel to foreign climes. To quote another intrepid adventurer and childhood heroine of mine, Dorothy Gale who knew a thing or two about appreciating what you have in your own back yard – “There’s no place like home”, so I’ll also include adventures had here in Wales.

Dorothy also knew about travelling in style. With a few clicks of those ruby slippers  (or if like me you read the books, silver slippers) she was transported to her destination, with no fuss,  and no long queues at check in. I’m sure I’ll be dreaming of my own pair at the airport this week.