By Allen Boyer
Special to the Eagle

This evening, at 6 p.m., at The Powerhouse, during Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, Square Books presents Marion Garrard Barnwell.  Featured is her new dual memoir, “All The Things We Didn’t Say.”

Professor Barnwell is well-known to graduates of Delta State University, where she taught writing and literature for twenty-five years (as well as co-founding Tapestry Magazine).  Others may know her from the writing workshops she has led, her published fiction, her play “Rats!” or her longtime service with the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

“All The Things We Didn’t Say” is a dual memoir.  Barnwell’s personal recollections engage with a memoir written by her grandmother, Mary Dubose Trice Clark.

Mary Clark wrote her memoir in 1956, when she was in her late seventies.  Her story, published here for the first time, dwells on northeast Mississippi – Okolona, Nettleton, Verona, and Tupelo.  It is the work of a formidable woman who attended Belmont College, taught music and ran a dress shop, worked the switchboard when the telephone came to Tupelo, and managed a household of five children and her husband, a successful banker.  She knew the same Mississippi that William Faulkner depicted – but she graduated from Belmont the same year that Faulkner was born, and she outlived him by five years.

“All The Things We Didn’t Say” is published by the University Press of Mississippi, the newest volume in the Willie Morris Series in Memoir and Biography.  The Press announces:

“Written at the age of seventy-seven, the same age as her grandmother when she wrote her memoir, Barnwell’s writing emerges as a response to the enigmatic silence within her grandmother’s narrative. It paints a vivid and expansive picture of [Barnwell’s] own life in the Mississippi Delta while also addressing profound themes of alcoholism, racism, shared family history, and the intricate dynamics between generations of women. As Barnwell weaves her own memoir into the fabric of this book, she takes readers on her emotional journey of self-discovery and truth-telling that leads to healing.”

Barnwell previously edited “A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives,” which won a Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.  She is the coauthor of “Touring Literary Mississippi” and coeditor of “Fannye Cook: Mississippi’s Pioneering Conservationist.”  All four of her books are University Press of Mississippi publications.

 

“All The Things We Didn’t Say: Two Memoirs”

By Marion Garrard Barnwell and Mary Dubose Trice Clark

University Press of Mississippi.  240 pp. $25.00