Writers and Readers Flock to St. Francisville

Writers and Readers Flock to St. Francisville in February
By Anne Butler

A mecca for creative souls ever since John James Audubon painted dozens of his Birds of America studies in the St. Francisville area in 1821, this little rivertown now harbors artists, musicians, designers, authors, and even talented rock painters who relish its peaceful atmosphere and stimulating environs. And for the past ten years the slow cold month of February has been enlivened by the Writers & Readers Symposium, now sponsored by A Celebration of Literature and Art, that draws interested readers and writers from a wide area to hear published authors of all genres speak about their creative processes and mingle with enthusiastic fans. This year’s symposium is slated for February 18 from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at beautiful Hemingbough Conference Center just south of St. Francisville, LA. Sure to be a popular addition is a separate but related Writers Retreat.

Featured professionals presenting at this year’s Symposium of Writers and Readers are Louisiana’s current Poet Laureate Peter Cooley; award-winning memoirist Melissa Delbridge; novelist Deborah Johnson ; and Rheta Grimsley Johnson, who will also lead the Writers Retreat.

Born in Missouri, raised in Nebraska, resident of San Francisco and then Rome for many years, award-winning novelist Deborah Johnson lives in Mississippi now, setting for her riveting novels The Secret of Magic and The Air Between Us, which won the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction for its insightful take on human nature and endearing cast of characters. The Secret of Magic won the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was a finalist for the Earnest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Johnson found inspiration for this book while researching the United States’ first African-American Supreme Court justiceThurgood Marshall and one of his NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s first civil rights causes of the postwar era, a black veteran purposefully blinded when a policeman used a billy club to punch out both of his eyes.

Melissa Delbridge, recently retired as archivist at Duke, is the author of the witty and wise Family Bible, called “a gritty coming-of-age story set on the banks of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with everything one expects of the Deep South: incest (some willing, some not), guns, bourbon, insanity, Jesus, fast women, cheating men. But Melissa Delbridge explodes and exploits these clichés into something startling and new, and in spite of the horror aroused by some events, it’s a hell of a fun ride. Delbridge’s ability to bring such joy to her readers through narratives that contain so much quiet sorrow is a true testament to her understanding of what it means to persevere.” Said another reviewer, “Reading it was like going to a reunion. Family Bible took me home.”

Also presenting at the Writers and Readers Symposium will be Louisiana’s current Poet Laureate Peter Cooley, Midwest native with a doctorate in Modern Letters from the University of Iowa (his Writers’ Workshop dissertation was a book of his own poetry) who has lived for a number of years in New Orleans, where he is Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. His poems have been published in more than 100 anthologies and over 700 magazines. His nine books of poetry include Divine Margins, A Place Made of Starlight, The Astonished Hours, and most recently Night Bus to the Afterlife dealing with Hurricane Katrina. Besides having taught at universities across this country and abroad, he has also had the challenging opportunity to present writing workshops “in a mental hospital, a prison, in pre-schools, grade schools, high schools, and to the elderly, the socially disadvantaged, and the illiterate.” If he can hold the attention of such diverse audiences, surely he can captivate a group of rapt readers and writers anxious to hear about his meticulous approach to his demanding craft.

Back by popular demand for the Writers and Readers Symposium is award-winning journalist and accomplished author Rheta Grimsley Johnson, who has covered the South in all its glory for four decades. Following years as an intrepid reporter for newspapers both large and small in iconic southern locales like Birmingham, Memphis and Atlanta, Johnson began writing columns syndicated nationally to hundreds of papers including the Advocate, columns celebrating what Encyclopedia Alabama calls “seemingly average southern people whose stories she elevates to the universal.” It is precisely this fond look at our foibles and fascinating off-the-wall places and people that won Johnson the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award for human interest reporting as well as the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Distinguished Writing Award. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1991.

Johnson also writes books. In 1989 she published Good Grief, The Story of Charles M. Schulz, the authorized biography of the creator of “Peanuts.” Other published books, moving memoirs of life with husbands, dogs, and assorted other characters, include Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana; Dogs Buried Over the Bridge; Hank Hung The Moon and Warmed our Cold, Cold Hearts; and Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming. The titles alone promise warm and witty and sometimes heartbreaking recollections of experiences that resonate with readers who grew up in the South. We know those people. We ARE those people! And Johnson vividly captures a time and place to which we can all relate, for she sees beyond the surface to the very soul, with love and laughter and, yes, more than a few tears. On those rare occasions when she turns her searing glance to contentious contemporary issues, her columns are cut-to-the-bone honest, like it or not. Johnson and her handsome husband Hines Hall, retired Auburn history professor, divide their time between Fishtrap Hollow and The Pass in Mississippi these days.

After individual author presentations, Writers and Readers Symposium participants are treated to lunch and homemade desserts, followed by a panel discussion led by lively local writer/artist Carolyn Thornton. Tickets for the symposium, $55 in advance or $65 at the door, are available online at www.brownpapertickets.com or through OLLI at LSU. For additional information, contact oliviapass@bellsouth.net.

Those participating in the Writers Retreat (preregistration required; separate fee) led by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, a workshop welcoming both fiction and nonfiction authors including beginners, will get together for a wine and cheese reception at Hemingbough on February 18 from 5 to 7 p.m., then enjoy both breakfast and lunch during the actual workshop February 19 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season and are both spectacular.

Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Monday and Tuesday). In January Oakley features programs called “12th Night Tea” for mothers and daughters on January 7th (preregister by calling 225-635-3739), and “Breaking the Chains” on January 14th, an examination of the 1811 Louisiana slave rebellion plus a look at slavery on this particular plantation. Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site from January 9 through January 22 presents a special well-researched slant to its house tours debunking the inaccurate myths repeated all too often on historic home tours.

The St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and especially bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, birding, photography, hunting, and kayaking on Bayou Sara. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.

For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.westfeliciana.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Walker Percy Weekend a big ol’ block party in downtown St. Francisville, LA
By Anne Butler

The inaugural Walker Percy Weekend was so successful last year that they’re holding a second annual one this June 5, 6 and 7 in St. Francisville, LA, with promises of just as much fun---a memorable celebration of the acclaimed novelist’s life and work with good food, craft beer and bourbon, boiled crawfish, live music and a great time discussing books and southern culture under the moss-hung live oaks. Lectures and panel discussions, readings and films, progressive front-porch bourbon sipping, twilight cocktails in the ruins garden of one former Percy plantation home and other guided tours of area sites readers of Percy’s works will recognize.

What, you may ask, does the late acclaimed Covington author Walker Percy have to do with West Feliciana Parish? Plenty, as it turns out. He used some iconic sites including the state pen at Angola and the River Bend nuclear plant in his famous works, as well as a somewhat fictionalized version of the whole parish. Not to mention all the family connections, because in the St. Francisville area, from the 19th century on, there has been a Percy under practically every bush---sheriffs, farmers, cattlemen, even one cattlewoman who famously drove a herd of cows to LSU in Baton Rouge to pay her tuition during the Great Depression. Percy family associations with many of the historic plantations are legendary—Afton Villa, Greenwood, Ellerslie, Retreat, Rosale, etc., all the way back to Beech Woods Plantation, where the mistress of the house hired Lucy Audubon to tutor neighborhood children in the 1820s. Several decades earlier, the very first Percy to arrive in West Feliciana, while it was still part of Spanish West Florida, established the family foothold and then drowned himself in a fit of despondency in Percy Creek, foreshadowing the sad propensity toward suicide that seemed to run through the generations of the author’s family as it did in Hemingway’s.

Called “intellectually serious but high spirited,” the Walker Percy Weekend features lectures and panel discussions on topics including “Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy: Catholics in the Christ-Haunted South,” “Walker Percy and David Foster Wallace: Losing it at the Movies,” “From Gone With the Wind to Garden & Gun: Walker Percy at the Crossroads of the Old South and the New,” and “Mississippi Woman, Louisiana Man: Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and the Southern Imagination.”

There’s also a Twilight in the Ruins cocktail party in the spectacular gardens of Afton Villa Plantation, former Percy home that burned in the sixties; guided tours of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and the River Bend Nuclear Plant, plus self-guided drive-bys to notable Percy family properties; and Craft Beer and Crawfish in oak-shaded Parker Park with live music by Ben Bell and the Stardust Boys.

And in tribute to Percy’s memorable essay called “Bourbon, Neat,” there will again be progressive bourbon-tastings on front galleries throughout St. Francisville’s downtown Historic District. As he explored in his works the search for meaning in an increasingly materialistic society, Percy applauded the application of a few shots of bourbon daily to “warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons.” What, he wondered, “if a man comes home from work every day at 5:30 to the exurbs…and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: ‘Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?’” Hoist the bottle.

Proceeds benefit the Freyhan Foundation’s ongoing efforts to restore as a community cultural center the area’s first public school building, a stately brick structure overlooking the Mississippi River with a grand third-floor auditorium and an outdoor amphitheater down the hill. Nancy Vinci, Freyhan Foundation head, calls the Walker Percy Weekend the group’s biggest fundraiser and appreciates the national exposure the restoration project receives. “Hopefully,” she says, “in a few years we will be having Walker Percy Weekend events in the restored Freyhan building.”

For tickets and schedule of events, visit www.walkerpercyweekend.org or email info@walkerpercyweekend.org. Contributions are deductible to this 501 © (3) arts organization.

June also brings The Day The War Stopped in St. Francisville, Civil War re-enactment of a moment of civility in the midst of a bloody conflict when Masons in blue and grey joined the Episcopal rector in burying a Union gunboat commander and fellow Mason from New York. Free events are scheduled June 12, 13 and 14th around Grace Episcopal Church and the Masonic Lodge; for information, www.daythewarstopped.com.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: the Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season and are both spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and especially bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.

For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Writers and Readers Symposium

Writers and Readers Symposium Coming Soon to St. Francisville, LA
By Anne Butler

West Feliciana Parish Library

As 2015 dawns, St. Francisville steps into the future with a number of improvements, from the grand new library and prospects of a commodious new hospital to several much anticipated new restaurants and shops. But location scouts have long appreciated the little town’s ability to step BACK in time, the many preserved historic structures making it possible to throw some dirt on the streets and…voila!...it’s the 19th century.

Residents deal daily with this dichotomy, the delicate balance of preservation and progress, recognizing that the present and hopes for a financially stable future are of necessity firmly grounded in the past, built upon history. Town founders had forethought and high hopes, laying out side streets with optimistic names like Prosperity and Progress. As that old Greek proverb proclaimed, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

But how to connect past and present, especially in a meaningful and sensible way? Participants at A Celebration of Literature and Art’s Writers and Readers Symposium on Saturday, February 21, at Hemingbough Convention Center in St. Francisville will get a variety of unique views on the interconnections between past and present as four celebrated authors—mystery writer Abigail Padgett, poet Ava Leavell Haymon, New Orleans novelist and short story writer Moira Crone, photographer Richard Sexton, all with new books-- share their creative processes both individually and in moderated panel discussions with audience participation encouraged.

Abigail Padgett’s latest book is An Unremembered Grave. A resident of San Diego who has visited St. Francisville over many years, Padgett was struck by a 1990s photograph showing excavations through the striated strata of Angola’s Tunica Hills. At the lowest level of a dirt pit cut deep into the loess soil, LSU paleontologists were shown examining mammoth bones, while at the very top ground-level layer, archaeologists and prison staff in the same photograph examined newly uncovered skeletal remains of an unidentified 19th-century burial.

Considering these layered connections, a single photograph linking time periods from prehistoric creatures through Native Americans and antebellum plantations to the present correctional facility, award-winning mystery writer Padgett has woven an imaginative web of intrigue involving a prescient history professor, a spooky Louisiana plantation, an innocent prisoner, an ancient slave-made quilt. And, oh yes, a charming vampire with a plausible explanation for these entwined moments of time, whose slumber under the oppressive weight of history was interrupted atop that loessial bluff on Angola, the vampire whose blood-thirst was essential to pass along the eternal stories, the immutable history of the race and the currents of collective memory coursing through the veins of living creatures.

Gifted writer-photographer Richard Sexton’s most recent book, Creole World: Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean Sphere, explores and illustrates with dreamy images the Creole connections between New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean. It’s all in the eye, really---well, maybe the mind too, and the heart and soul. That’s how Sexton, with his strong architecture and art background, spots the elegance amidst the decadence and celebrates the colorful remnants of Creole culture even in the most desolate Caribbean slum or New Orleans housing project. Compelling images reflect the author’s four decades roaming across the Latin Caribbean capturing architectural and urban similarities connecting New Orleans’ Creole heritage with colonial cultures in Haiti, Colombia, Panama, Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador and other historic locales.

Sexton says his Creole book “isn’t about home decorating---or pretty architecture, or even about city planning, although I think it addresses those interests. It’s my attempt to sum up an outlook---and a culture---that feels Creole to me. I’m drawn to places that accept accidents and decay, that put the past to fresh uses, that proceed by trial and error and keep things that work even if they don’t fit the rules.” As Sexton, who has lived in New Orleans since 1991, explains in an interview with Chris Waddington of nola.com, “I don’t just celebrate the past. I’m looking to see how the past can help us get to the future.”

Prestigious LSU Press has published four collections of Louisiana Poet Laureate Ava Haymon’s poetry, and she is editor of the press’ Barataria Poetry Series. A Mississippi native who grew up in Kansas City with a Baptist preacher father who made her memorize ten verses of Scripture each week and recite them perfectly before the television set could be turned on, she attended Baylor University and then moved to Baton Rouge so her husband could go to LSU Law School and she could get a master’s degree in English.

She found Louisiana a poet’s dream, “a wonderful place to write poetry about. It has exotic weather, all sorts of ethnic groups and fabulous music. It’s sensory.” And yet, she finds inspiration in family dynamics across the generations as well. Her most recent book is titled Eldest Daughter, in which LSU Press says the poet combines the sensory and the spiritual in wild verbal fireworks. “Concrete descriptions of a woman’s life in the mid-20th-century American South mix with wider concerns about family lies and truths, and culture that supports or forbids clear speech. Haymon’s poems encourage us to revel in the natural world and enjoy its delights, as well as to confront the hard truths that would keep us from doing so.”

Also inspired by family dynamics in the South is Moira Crone, respected New Orleans novelist and short story writer. Called one of the best American writers, Crone attended University of North Carolina and Smith College, then studied writing at Johns Hopkins. After moving to Louisiana, she directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing at LSU in Baton Rouge before relocating to New Orleans with her husband, writer Rodger Kamenetz.

When she received the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers for the body of her work, it was said that her interest in things spiritual “has led her work to be wittily described as ‘Southern Gnostic.’ In books like What Gets Into Us, Period of Confinement, and Dream State, Crone charts a zone of family resemblance and family claustrophobia. Her work can be hilarious in dealing with contemporary moral relativism. She is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart for her beleaguered, if often witty characters.”

Moira Crone’s newest book, published in late fall 2014, is The Ice Garden, called “a story as dazzling and dangerous as ice, a heart stopper. This may just be the most haunting and memorable novel you will ever read.” The book’s narrator is ten years old, daughter of a mother trapped in the suffocating southern culture of the sixties, and only she can save her family. Of all Crone’s prize-winning novels and short stories, reviewers call The Ice Garden her finest book yet.

Tickets to the Writers and Readers Symposium, including lunch with these authors and a juried exhibit of photographs linked to literature, may be purchased at www.brownpapertickets.com ( OLLI members can sign up through LSU); January tickets are $40, February $50, at the door $60. Seating is limited. Thanks to the Town of St. Francisville, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, and as administered by the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. Funding has also been provided by Entergy and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Adjuncts to the program include Ava Hayman teaching a poetry workshop for Bains Elementary School students, and Abigail Padgett, who has taught creative writing at Harvard and other institutions, working with promising upper class students. In addition, Hayman and Padgett will conduct a Writers’ Workshop for aspiring and professional adult authors Saturday, February 28, in a stimulating plantation setting.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and
Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: the Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Continuing Ed in St. Francisville

By Anne Butler

OLLI birders at the Tunica Hills Campground - photo by Darlene Reaves

The Boomer Generation, just reaching retirement age in remarkably good physical and mental shape, is not surrendering to old age without a fight. Instead, they are running marathons and racing bikes, beginning new careers and travelling to all corners of the globe. The rocking chairs on the porches of their mountain chalets are strictly for après ski, and when they consider relocating in their retirement years, lifestyle enhancements are even more important than economic opportunities.

Besides physical challenges, these busy Boomers are looking for creative inspiration and mental stimulation as well. Fortunately today, even a small rural community like St. Francisville, LA, can augment the appeal of its peaceful pastoral landscape and intriguing history by offering retirees---in fact anyone over fifty---a myriad of ways to keep minds active well into retirement, thanks to a program familiarly known as OLLI at LSU.

Advocate columnist Smiley Anders (center) presented the program for May’s Coffee at the Feliciana Chapter of OLLI in St. Francisville. Photo by Darlene Reaves.

Begun at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1996 as Lagniappe Studies, in 2007 the program became the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at LSU (OLLI), joining a nationwide network of programs devoted to lifelong learning. Today OLLI at LSU has five area chapters and over 1,300 members, with volunteer leadership from local chapters planning courses, coffees and field trips with the support of LSU Continuing Education staff.

Sample courses fall into the categories of the Arts, Languages, Humanities, Social Sciences, Personal Enrichment, and Technology. Oil and watercolor painting, art history, opera and film are some Arts offerings, while Language courses have included French, Cajun French, Spanish and Italian. In the Humanities, course offerings have included such topics as the History of Medicine, The Letters of Paul, The World of Anton Chekhov and the Breakup of American Democracy, while Social Sciences classes include such topics as the Changing Media Landscape, Great Decisions, Current Moral Problems and Financial Strategies for a Successful Retirement. Yoga, Gardening, Bridge, Birding, Life Writing, Line and Square Dancing are just a few of the Personal Enrichment offerings, and Technology classes cover iPhones, i-Pads, Cloud, and Getting the Best from the Internet.

"It's a Watson!" Great OLLI Felicianas coffee today - photo by Darlene Reaves

Courses are taught by a wide variety of instructors, experts in their fields, many of them retired Ph.D. college professors. There are three semesters each year, and most classes meet once a week 9:30-11:30 a.m. for four weeks. Besides courses held in more than 23 locations throughout South Louisiana, there are Field Trips exploring interesting nearby locations, Coffees with speakers and refreshments, and Nature Walks accompanied by experienced naturalists.

There are OLLI chapters in Ascension, Assumption and the Feliciana Parishes, as well as a Cajun Prairie Chapter in Eunice, and a large Lagniappe Chapter in Baton Rouge. In all, OLLI has 1,386 active members who had the opportunity to participate in more than 213 activities in 2013-2014.  OLLI members may attend activities offered by any of the five chapters. Membership, open to anyone 50 years or over who enjoys learning, is $40 annually, tax deductible, plus minimal course fees and only occasional required texts. Information is available from OLLI at LSU, 1225 Pleasant Hall, LSU, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803; telephone 225-578-6763; email OLLI@outreach.lsu.edu .

The steadily growing Feliciana Chapter in St. Francisville has more than 170 members, with an ambitious schedule of 53 activities offered throughout the year; in all, there were some 676 participants. Limited summer session begins in July with Yoga and a literature class on Memoirs, and there are field trips and coffees scheduled for the fall as well as a full schedule of exciting classes in other subjects. Some classes have been so popular that participants were reluctant to let them end and have started clubs---Spanish, Bridge and Birding groups continue to get together on a regular basis.

In addition to the continuing stimulation of engaging OLLI classes, St. Francisville residents and visitors can look forward to the inaugural Walker Percy Weekend June 6 to 8th, a literary festival of panel discussions and fun extra activities involving progressive front-porch bourbon tastings, crawfish boils and craft beer under the oaks, and field trips to antebellum homes, the local nuclear plant, state penitentiary and other sites significant in Percy’s writings. Friday evening features the screening of an LBP documentary on the author, and Saturday the discussions include “Cinematic Catechism,” “Lost in the Cosmos,” “Place and Non-Place” as related to Percy’s works. A digital recording project will encourage participants to contribute their own experiences to the LSU Library’s oral history archives. Saturday night’s Dinner in the Park features Louisiana cuisine and Sunday morning participants can attend mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.

St. Francisville is also the site of the annual Day The War Stopped on June 13, 14 and 15, a re-enactment of the 1863 burial of a Union gunboat commander in the cemetery at Grace Episcopal in a rare moment of civility amidst a bloody war. A tribute to the universality of Masonic brotherhood---Union and Confederate Masons participated in the burial service along with the Episcopal rector---the weekend includes graveyard histories, historical presentations, vintage dancing and music, a touching drama and re-enactment of the actual burial, plus special activities at both local state historic sites, Oakley and Rosedown Plantations.

The Day the War Stopped photo by ptWalsh

 Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination.  A number of restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season, and spring is definitely the season for spectacular bloom. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations some weekends to allow visitors to experience 19^th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty shops, many in restored historic structures, and restaurants serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register historic district; there are also motel accommodations for bus groups.
For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society’s museum and tourist information center at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224 or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities). For special events information online: www.daythewarstopped.net (for schedule information; all events are free and open to the public); www.walkerpercyweekend.org (for ticket and schedule information).

Writers and Readers

A GATHERING OF WRITERS AND READERS IN ST. FRANCISVILLE When the West Feliciana Parish Police Jury in midsummer approved a bid of $2.7 million to construct a new library, old timers considered it a natural progression in an area that has traditionally been devoted to the literary arts. The town had one of the state’s earliest public libraries, and the surrounding plantations had extensive private libraries of their own. Today St. Francisville is home for several published authors and retired university literature professors. Besides looking forward to the spacious new library, today’s booklovers anticipate with great relish a special event dubbed A Gathering of Writers and Readers, begun in 2007 and now under the auspices of Arts For All, the non-profit umbrella agency for all arts in West Feliciana. The celebration brings together published authors with readers who might not otherwise have the opportunity to hear writers read from and discuss their work. Scheduled for Saturday, February 22, 2014, at Hemingbough Cultural Arts Center just south of St. Francisville, the all-day event begins at 8:30 a.m. and will be moderated by SLU professor and former bookstore owner Charles Elliott, himself a writer, film director and noted character. Four professional authors will be featured, as well as distinguished repeat guest Ernest Gaines, recent recipient of the National Medal of Arts, who will be honored for his extraordinary literary contributions, and featured writers from previous years are invited to “gather” again. Dr. Wiley Cash, nationally acclaimed award-winning fiction author, had his first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, selected as a New York Times Notable Book. A North Carolina native, Cash earned his PhD at UL Lafayette and studied under writer-in-residence emeritus Ernest J. Gaines. It was there that he began the bestselling book A Land More Kind than Home, which NPR called “great Gothic Southern fiction filled with whiskey, guns and snake-handling.” His second book, the just-released This Dark Road to Mercy, promises to be just as riveting, a novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance. Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and author of nonfiction books including Poor Man’s Provence—Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana about time spent in Henderson in the Atchafalaya Basin. Dr. Julie Kane, Northwestern State University professor and Louisiana’s past Poet Laureate, has published five volumes of poetry, and her poems have appeared in dozens of anthologies and journals. Both Cash and Kane are experienced university professors, and Johnson has been on the short list for a Pulitzer for journalism; her popular folksy columns appear in Baton Rouge’s The Advocate. Anne Butler writes nonfiction books preserving Louisiana history and culture, as well as children’s books, hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers, and true crime, including Weep for the Living; as a crime writer she had certainly not intended to become an actual participant, but when she was shot five times, she managed to get a good book out of even that experience. Her more recent books  Louisiana Hwy. 1  and Main Streets of Louisiana include beautiful color images by Louisiana photographer Henry Cancienne. These diverse authors have been specifically chosen to give the audience a well-balanced appreciation for the art of literature---poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, nonfiction, all with great appeal to Louisiana readers. They will share their creative processes and works; participants, including several students on scholarships, are encouraged to ask questions and will have an opportunity to interact with the authors. Seating is limited. For online information visit http://artsforall.felicianalocal.com. Tickets, $35, may be purchased at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/491750 and include parking, individual author presentations as well as moderated panel discussions, book signings, refreshments, lunch and a dessert reception with authors. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, the Greater Baton Rouge Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency.  A grant from Entergy allowed Arts for All to invite Wiley Cash, who will be the Entergy Author for this event.

Dr. Wiley Cash Rhea Grimsley Johnson Dr. Julie Kane Anne Butler

ST. FRANCISVILLE HAS ALWAYS CELEBRATED READERS AND WRITERS



BY Anne Butler

Audubon Market Hall

When the West Feliciana Parish Police Jury in mid-July approved a bid of $2.7 million to construct a new parish library on a wonderfully hilly wooded lot, oldtimers considered it a natural progression in an area that has traditionally been devoted to the literary arts. Indeed, St. Francisville, today the refuge for several published authors and retired university literature professors, had one of the state’s earliest public libraries. Historian Elisabeth Dart wrote that the state’s second oldest library was established in St. Francisville by 1812, and the Silver Anniversary Edition of the local newspaper, the True Democrat, commended the town for its public library as early as 1828.



The early plantations, of course, had extensive private libraries of their own, for the planter families were cultured and well travelled, with wide-ranging interests; their home libraries provided the resources for the education of the younger children, who often were taught by live-in tutors until they went away to colleges Up East. The book collection at The Cottage Plantation, donated to LSU in the fifties, numbered in the thousands, as might be expected for the home of an early contributor of scholarly writings to state historical quarterlies. The library at Butler Greenwood Plantation still contains nearly 3,000 vintage volumes, including such rarities as an 1807 Life of George Washington, the 1814 printing of the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Malte-Brun’s 1831 geographies of the world, Gibbon’s History of Rome, and works by Hugo, Dickens, Fielding, Balzac, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hawthorne and others in French, Spanish, German and Latin as well as English. And one of the most poignant scenes in the Civil War novel So Red The Rose, written by Stark Young at Laurel Hill in upper West Feliciana, depicts the elderly Judge Edward McGehee distraught as he helplessly watches his home, Bowling Green, along with its library full of priceless treasures, burned to the ground by marauding soldiers.



Historic brick Audubon Market Hall on Royal Street in St. Francisville, built in 1819 as an open-air produce market, was later closed in and housed the Drama-Library League formed in honor of the artist Audubon, its members staging tableaux among the arched stalls where vendors once parked their produce wagons on market days. The library itself moved often as it grew to meet local needs. After Market Hall, where it remained through the thirties, it shared space on Ferdinand St. in an 1896 hardware store restored in the 1970s by the West Feliciana Historical Society as headquarters and museum. As the library outgrew that space, it moved into the former post office building down the street, a structure also purchased by the historical society in 1997.

WFP Historical Society Museum

Bursting at the seams once again, the library won approval in a bond issue election last year that allowed planning for a new parish library that can live up to its guiding principle: “Preserving our past, preparing for our future.” The library (website http://wfplibrary.org) is full of digital offerings, e-books, interlibrary loan offerings, computers and databases, and special activities geared to all ages and interests. And yes, there is even a card catalog bursting with good old books.



Besides looking forward to the spacious new library, today’s booklovers anticipate with great relish the revival of a special event dubbed A Gathering of Writers and Readers, begun in 2007 by the Friends of the Library and now under the auspices of Arts For All, the non-profit umbrella agency for all arts in West Feliciana. The celebration brings together published authors with readers who might not otherwise have the opportunity to hear writers read from and discuss their work. Scheduled for Saturday, February 22, 2014, at Hemingbough just south of St. Francisville, the all-day event will be moderated by SLU professor and former bookstore owner Charles Elliott, himself a writer, film director and noted character. Four professional authors will be featured, as well as repeat guest Ernest Gaines who will be honored for his extraordinary literary contributions, and featured writers from previous years are invited to “gather” again.



Dr. Wiley Cash, nationally acclaimed award-winning fiction author, had his first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, selected as a New York Times Notable Book. A North Carolina native, Cash earned his PhD at UL Lafayette and studied under writer-in-residence emeritus Ernest J. Gaines; it was there that he began the book NPR called “great Gothic Southern fiction filled with whiskey, guns and snake-handling.” Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and author of nonfiction books including Poor Man’s Provence—Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana about time spent in Henderson in the Atchafalaya Basin. Dr. Julie Kane, Northwestern State University professor and Louisiana’s past Poet Laureate, has published five volumes of poetry and her poems have appeared in dozens of anthologies and journals.. Anne Butler writes nonfiction books preserving Louisiana history and culture. Both Cash and Kane are experienced university professors, and Johnson has been on the short list for a Pulitzer for journalism; her popular folksy columns appear in The Advocate. These diverse authors have been specifically chosen to give the audience a well-balanced appreciation for the art of literature---poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, nonfiction, all with great appeal to Louisiana readers. They will share their creative processes and works; participants, including several students on scholarships, are encouraged to ask questions and will have an opportunity to interact with the authors. Online information http://artsforall.uniquelyfeliciana.com or committee chair olivapass@bellsouth.net.

Author Walker Percy

A few months later, in May 2014, another exciting literary event is being planned for St. Francisville, this one to honor acclaimed author Walker Percy, many of whose novels have local connections as did he himself; he called Feliciana “a happy land of decent fok and droll folkways and quiet backwaters, the whole suffused by gentle Epsicopal rectitude.” Country Roads magazine cites the “unique combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility and deep Catholic faith” of Percy’s novels, books that “plumbed the depths of family history and the world around him to explore the dislocation of man in the modern age.”



The foundation established to restore the historic Freyhan School in St. Francisville as a cultural center/museum benefits from this fundraiser the weekend of May 9, 10 and 11. Organizers promise the Walker Percy Weekend will feature not just lectures and panel discussions but also tours of area locations important in Percy’s works, and maybe even some stargazing and bourbon tasting, the latter a tip of the hat (or clink of the glass) to Percy’s memorable essay from Signposts in a Strange Land. Bourbon, Percy said, “does for me what a piece of cake did for Proust,” and he meant the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, “the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons…”



With a new library rising and several literary celebrations in the works, St. Francisville can indeed claim its place as a genuine cultural tourism destination within a state rightfully celebrated throughout the centuries for all of its arts. And with the summer heat making this the ideal time to curl up in the A/C or shade with a good book, readers now have advance notice and can be well prepared to participate in Q&A sessions with and about these wonderful writers.

Speaker Mark Lester

There are other end-of-summer activities in St. Francisville to be enjoyed as well. The West Feliciana Historical Society joins the Julius Freyhan Foundation to present “Remember Oleszyce: The Story of Eva Galler” on Sunday, August 18th, at 2 p.m. in recently restored Temple Sinai on Prosperity St. in St. Francisville. Featured speaker is Mark Lester, Social Studies teacher at West Feliciana High School and Holocaust Teaching Fellow. A passionate Holocaust researcher who participated in the first Fellowship program of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane, Lester will present the experiences of Eva Galler, born in eastern Poland in Oleszyce. Three thousand Jews lived there at the time Germany attacked Poland in 1939; twenty survived. The program is free and open to the public; for information, telephone 225-635-6330 or email wfhist@bellsouth.net.



On Saturday, August 24, beginning at 5 p.m., a fun evening extravaganza called Polos & Pearls puts a little after-hours sizzle into summer by enticing the community into historic downtown St. Francisville’s Main Street community for bargain shopping, food, art and lively music, with participants invited to stroll along the bricked sidewalks or hop aboard a trolley to enjoy the little town’s unique boutique shops, art galleries and antiques emporiums, each enhancing the shopping experience with fine food provided by area restaurants and live music. For information, telephone 225-635-3873 or online www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com.

Musicians at Polo & Pearls

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: the Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, the Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations most weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs.



The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.



For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities, including the twice-weekly Farmers Markets on Thursdays and Saturdays).