Short Takes: News and Reviews

Judith Ortiz Cofer, author, educator, member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and friend of the Press, passed away on December 30th. Over the years we published many books by Cofer and cherished the partnership and friendship. A remembrance by UGA Press Director Lisa Bayer can be found here. The University of Georgia community will honor the life of Cofer on Friday, January 27th at 3:00 pm in the Chapel on UGA’s campus. A reception will follow at the Demosthenian Hall. Additionally, a tribute panel is planned on February 10th at the Association of Writers & Writers Programs Conference titled “Judith Ortiz Cofer —Woman in Front of the Sun,” named after one of the author’s works. More information can be found here.

Madison County gained its first canoe launch along the Broad River dubbed “Briar’s Landing” in honor and in memory of Oglethorpe teen Briar Newsome, who loved to spend time canoeing on the river with his dad. Maps and information from the Broad River User’s Guide by Joe Cook was used in determining the location for the launch. Find out more about the new launch and the story behind its creation here.

Christopher Collins Awarded the Georgia Poetry Prize

The University of Georgia Press is pleased to announce that Christopher Collins is the winner of the 2017 Georgia Poetry Prize. In partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, and the University of Georgia, the University of Georgia Press established the Georgia Poetry Prize in 2015 as a national competition that celebrates excellence in poetry.

The winner of the annual contest receives a cash award of one thousand dollars, a publication contract with the University of Georgia Press, and invitations to read their work at the three sponsoring institutions. The prize was established through the generous support of the Georgia and Bruce McEver Fund for the Arts and Environment at the University of Georgia Press. Collins’s collection My American Night will be published by the University of Georgia Press in February 2018.

Collins earned his MFA in creative writing (poetry) at Murray State University. He is a former captain in the U.S. Army (Reserve), having served twelve years. He completed three overseas combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq as a platoon leader and as a commander. He has published one poetry chapbook titled Gathering Leaves for War (Finishing Line Press, 2013).

Collins is currently a PhD student in literary nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati, having left the world of teaching high school English. He is married to his high school sweetheart, and they have two children. They live in the rural town of Independence, Kentucky. My American Night will be his first full-length poetry collection to be published.

“Seldom have I ever read such a brutally honest depiction of warfare. Chris Collins does not shy away from the painful complexities but lets the mysteries shine through. In a voice both original and completely honest, he reveals the deep paradoxes of the human spirit. This is a powerful collection of poems,” said this year’s judge, David Bottoms, the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University and former Poet Laureate of Georgia (2000–12).

The inaugural judge for the Georgia Poetry Prize, Thomas Lux, who was the Bourne Professor of Poetry and Director of Poetry at Tech at the Georgia Institute of Technology, passed away on February 5, 2017, after a long illness. The UGA Press and its partners owe a debt of gratitude to Lux for his instrumental role in the launching of the Georgia Poetry Prize, his influential role as a writer and teacher, and for his decades-long dedication to the arts community in Georgia.

The finalists in this year’s competition are Nathaniel Perry of Farmville, Virginia; Joshua McKinney of Fair Oaks, California; Kelly Morse of Ashland, Wisconsin; Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum of Boulder, Colorado; Willa Carroll of New York, New York; Ryan Teitman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Jorge Sanchez of Chicago, Illinois; Samantha Deal of Kalamazoo, Michigan; and Mark Wagenaar of Valparaiso, Indiana.

How did teaching shape T.S. Eliot’s writing?

Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons will be present at the University of London for its inaugural 1858 Charter Lecture, celebrating the teaching work of T.S. Eliot. He will be giving a poetry reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets, following a Keynote Lecture by internationally acclaimed academic Professor Ronald Schuchard.

Professor Schuchard’s lecture, entitled ‘Eliot in the Classroom – 1916 to 1919’, will focus on Eliot’s early writing, much of which was shaped during his time as an extension tutor for the University of London. 

Eliot delivered regular classes to the working people of Southall in West London, where he was known for his conscientious marking of his students’ essays and providing feedback. In his reports to the University of London, Eliot recognised the talents of his students and their contribution to class discussions at the end of their long working days. In light of this, Eliot adapted his lectures to sustain his students’ interest by making them more relevant to their tastes, including Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. 

In the Keynote Lecture, Professor Schuchard will explore the influence T.S. Eliot’s teaching had on his development as a writer, and its impact on his later works. T.S. Eliot went on to become one of the most revered and accomplished writers of the 20th Century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. 

Internationally acclaimed actor Jeremy Irons will follow the lecture with a reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets to an audience of world renowned academics, guests, students and staff from the University of London. 

The inaugural lecture at Senate House, University of London, marks the awarding of the 1858 Charter by Queen Victoria. The Charter opened up the University's degrees to the world through distance and flexible learning, making it a world leader in delivering quality higher education across the world. 

Dr Mary Stiasny, Pro Vice-Chancellor (International), University of London, and Chief Executive of the University of London Academy, said: ‘We are delighted to be celebrating the Centenary of T.S. Eliot’s first academic year as an extension tutor with the University of London. In providing world-class education to working people in Southall, T.S. Eliot was contributing towards the University of London’s access agenda, which is to make higher education accessible for all that can benefit from it.’ 

She added: ‘We are delighted that Jeremy Irons will be reading from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, making the evening exceptionally special. His reading will follow a Keynote Lecture by Professor Ronald Schuchard, a Fellow of the Instituted of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, whose award-winning work and insight into T.S. Eliot life and writing is of a world-class standing.’

Deal of the Week: A Boy From Georgia

Our deal of the week is A Boy From Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South by Hamilton Jordan, a memoir by one of our great political strategists. This book chronicles Jordan’s childhood in Albany, Georgia, charting his moral and intellectual development as he gradually discovers the complicated legacies of racism, religious intolerance, and southern politics, and affords his readers an intimate view of the state’s wheelers and dealers. Jordan eventually went on to become a key aide to Jimmy Carter and was the architect of his stunning victory in the presidential campaign of 1976, and he served as Carter’s chief of staff in the White House.

Q&A with Jean Wyatt, author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels

his month we published Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels by Jean Wyatt, professor of English at Occidental College and author of Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism. Wyatt’s new book looks at the literary interplay between the depiction of love and its stylistic expression in Morrison’s later works. Curious and wanting to know more, we had a few questions for Wyatt. Below is our exchange.

What is it about the way Toni Morrison explores love that is so novel?

Each novel presents a different and distinct notion of love. What is consistent is that each novel’s form of love surprises conventional expectations—and perhaps causes a reader to look again at her own fixed beliefs about love and about who deserves the name of lover. In Jazz, for instance, love is a process of continual creation: a lover reinvents his love for another over and over, improvising an expression of love in the moment—as in jazz itself. In Home love is a disruptive force that creates profound changes in subjectivity.

Chronology in Morrison’s work is often choppy, distorted, and disorienting, which also tends to reflect what’s happening—or has happened—to her characters. Can you talk a little about why this is so important to the style and structure in her books?

Disruptions in chronological sequence accomplish several purposes in a Morrison narrative. Often, the discontinuity reflects the disrupted temporality of characters who have been subjected to trauma and hence live in the time of trauma: that is, a traumatizing event may have occurred in the past, but the character experiences the emotions appropriate to the event not when it occurred, but only now, in the present. Through being transported backwards and forwards in time, a reader experiences a simulacrum of the character’s disturbed temporality. Or the disorientation of a reader who does not know when or where she is in time and space may, as in Beloved, create a readerly disorientation that simulates the disorientation of the African captives who were thrown onto slave ships and deprived of all signposts of time and space. Or the unexplained interruption of the present-day narrative by an extended unrelated narrative that takes place several generations earlier, as in Beloved and Jazz, requires a reader to connect the troubled psychic processes of the present-day characters to the traumatic events of African-American history.

You write about how the ethical dialogue between reader and text is central to Morrison’s project of exposing, critiquing, and dismantling systems of oppression (including a reader’s own conscious and unconscious complicity with them). Can you point to a good example that demonstrates how she does this?

Whereas the earlier novels of Morrison often teach the reader about race and gender oppression through the actions or sufferings of the characters—or even by means of the narrator’s direct statements about systems of oppression—in the later novels Morrison teaches by more subtle means. Namely, she draws the reader into an ethical dialogue with the text that exposes the reader’s beliefs about race and gender and love and then provokes the reader to re-examine them. As Morrison often says in interview, she leaves gaps and spaces for the reader to fill in—with the reader’s own opinions, or, as she says in the essay “Home,” with the reader’s own “politics.” I think she is using the empty spaces, enigmas, and puzzles of her text to draw out a reader’s convictions about love, about race, about gender—and then prompt him or her to reexamine them. So many of her novels have a pedagogical purpose—to make you examine your own fixed beliefs about race, gender, and love.

Thus, instead of lecturing the reader directly or indirectly on the existence of race and gender hierarchies of power, Morrison’s later novels provide hooks for the reader’s preconceptions about gender, race, and love, and so expose the reader’s own allegiance to systems of oppression; some twist in narrative perspective then pushes the reader to confront these allegiances. For example, in the novel Love the title seems to refer through most of the novel to the wandering desires of Bill Cosey, the powerful man at the center of the story—so the reader becomes involved, as in a conventional love story, in following the desire of the man. In addition, the seemingly omniscient third-person narrator subtly tilts his account of Bill Cosey and his attendant women toward the man’s interests and perspective while diminishing the value and importance of the various women who circle around him. If the reader takes all this in as it is on the page, she may, once she comes to the surprise ending, become aware of some patriarchal assumptions of her own that have been blinding her to the real damage that Bill Cosey has done to women. The final chapter’s undermining of all the patriarchal norms and values of the first scene of reading pressures the reader to turn around on her own reading practice and to question the scrim of patriarchal preconceptions about men and women and love that have been guiding her reading of the Cosey story. For the surprise ending shows that the title Love does not refer to the man’s amorous desires, as in a conventional love story; rather, “love” is defined as the deep friendship between two eleven-year-old girls. In this way, the participation of the reader in co-creating the narrative leads—perhaps—to a recognition of her own complicity, conscious or unconscious, with reigning discursive and political systems of male dominance.

Can you talk about how you use psychoanalysis in analyzing Morrison’s work and why it’s a useful approach?

I use psychoanalytic concepts not to analyze a character, as psychoanalytic critics often do, but to understand how the narrative structure of a Morrison novel works on a reader. Sometimes Freud and his contemporary interpreters Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche present a crucial subjective process in the form of an anecdote or parable. Aligning such a psychoanalytic narrative with the narrative structure of a Morrison novel can illuminate the novel’s narrative strategy and how it affects a reader. In the introduction to Playing in the Dark Morrison writes, “The narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis” (v). So she seems to admire the way that psychoanalysis compresses a meaningful subjective process into a brief anecdote—and perhaps she also recognizes an affinity between her own narrative strategies and the stories that psychoanalysis tells.

Short Takes: News and Reviews

We recently announced “Georgia Reads,” an innovative virtual book club launched in partnership by the University of Georgia Press and Georgia Public Broadcasting, with support from Georgia Humanities. Each year, the partners will select two UGA Press titles, covering topics from history, politics, culture, and biography to the environment. GPB will host “Georgia Reads” on its website (gpb.org/georgia-reads) and feature content including GPB Radio interviews with authors, a regular blog that highlights each title, plus news of live events with the authors and ways to interact with them through social media.

The 25th anniversary edition of Rodger Lyle Brown’s Party Out of Bounds: The B-52’s, R.E.M., and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia has been selected as the first “Georgia Reads” title.  Originally published in 1991, this cult classic offers an insider’s look at the underground rock music culture that sprang from a lazy Georgia college town and helped put Athens on the international music map as the birthplace of bands including the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M.

Brown was recently interviewed by Bill Nigut, host of GPB Radio’s “Two Way Street,” which you can listen to here. There were also two launch events; Atlanta on March 1 and Athens on March 18 (pics from the Athens kick-off below). Thanks to everyone who came out.

Up next for Georgia Reads: The Rest of the Story Book Club will be discussing Party Out of Bounds at its March meeting on Tuesday, March 28th from 5:30-7:00 PM in Room 258 of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Library. This event is free and open to the public. More information can be found here.

Deal of the Week Spotlights Winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

Our deal this week spotlights two recent winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction: Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn and Faulty Predictions by Karin Lin-Greenberg.

In the eleven kaleidoscopic stories that make up Bright Shards of Someplace Else, Monica McFawn traces the combustive, hilarious, and profound effects that occur when people misread the minds of others. The funny and empathetic stories in Karin Lin-Greenberg’s Faulty Predictions explores fractured bonds and the struggle to connect among moments of optimism and hope.

From today (March 27, 2017) through next Monday (April 3, 2017), receive 50% off the $24.95 cloth editions of Bright Shards of Someplace Else (978-0-8203-4687-8) and Faulty Predictions (978-0-8203-4686-1) by entering promo code 08FOC17 in your shopping cart.

Deal of the Week: Conversations with Milošević by Sir Ivor Roberts

Our deal this week is Conversations with Milošević by Sir Ivor Roberts, a first hand portrayal of the so-called Butcher of the Balkans, the Serbian president whose ambitions sparked the Bosnian conflict. Roberts worked in the British Diplomatic Service for nearly forty years and was serving as the British Ambassador at Belgrade during the Bosnian civil war and the descent into war in Kosovo. At its heart this book is a portrait of an autocrat who rode the tiger of nationalism to serve his own ends and to promote those who furthered his agenda.

From today (April 3, 2017) through next Monday (April 10, 2017), receive 50% off the $32.95 cloth edition of Conversations with Milošević (978-0-8203-4943-5) by entering promo code 08MILO17 in your shopping cart.

This is not only a truly valuable addition to the literature on the breakup of Yugoslavia, it is also an incredibly interesting read. Sir Ivor Roberts was one of the few Western officials with sustained close-up interaction with Milošević, as well as with other leading Serbian and international personalities involved at the time. It is a fascinating account of Roberts’s time in Belgrade, full of anecdotes and character portraits.”

—JAMES KER-LINDSAY, Eurobank Senior Research Fellow on the Politics of Southeast Europe, London School of Economics

“This intriguing and informative book will serve not only as an explanation of why Yugoslavia disintegrated, and why it did so with such violence, but it will also open areas of debate on those processes which will be of interest and value to historians, as well as students of politics and international relations.”

Deal of the Week: Johnny Mercer by Glenn T. Eskew

Our deal this week is Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World by Glenn T. Eskew. Exhaustively researched, Eskew’s biography improves upon earlier popular treatments of the Savannah, Georgia–born songwriter to produce a sophisticated, insightful, evenhanded examination of one of America’s most popular and successful chart-toppers. 

From today (April 10, 2017) through next Monday (April 17, 2017), receive 50% off the $28.95 paperback edition of Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World (978-0-8203-4973-2) by entering promo code 08JMER17 in your shopping cart.

Eskew brings to life the vibrant music scene around the musician from the 1930s to the 1960s and uncovers the collaborations, friendships, and struggles that made Mercer a success. This thoroughly researched and compelling biography will appeal to scholars and students of popular American music.”

—Library Journal

“In this smart and meticulously researched biography, Georgia State University historian Glenn T. Eskew ac-cent-tchu-ates another of Mercer’s roles: architect of popular music during the late 1940s and the ’50s, which Eskew calls the Age of the Singer.”

—DENNIS DRABELLE, Washington Post

“‘No other songwriter appears as successfully involved in so many facets of America’s entertainment industry in the twentieth century,’ Glenn T. Eskew claims convincingly in Johnny Mercer. . . . Although Johnny Mercer is ponderous at times, it does justice to the giant accomplishments of the ‘pixie from Dixie.'”

—KEN EMERSON, Wall Street Journal

“Historians have tried to define the South, but few will leave you humming the Great American Songbook quite like Glenn T. Eskew does in Johnny Mercer.”

—Atlanta Magazine

Disseminating Information versus the Protection of Copyright

Publishers often fall in a contradictory spot when it comes to copyright law. On one level, a publisher’s job is to help disseminate information—to make widely available and to promote a particular set of texts that it deems of importance or interest to its varying audiences. But on another level, a publisher also aims to ensure that those texts remain uniquely its and the author’s own, that no one else copies the words and images and garners the accompanying financial and reputational rewards.

Copyediting and production come last in the process of making a book. As such, when these contradictory goals with regard to the ownership and sharing of information are still in flux at the time that a book is making its way into final form, serious issues can arise and difficult choices have to be made.

Our preference, always, is that all permissions are cleared by the time that the book enters copyediting—or at the latest, composition. This ensures that the copyeditor is looking at the final text and that we are typesetting a book that won’t have a passage or an image removed late in the process, thus requiring the rewriting of a slew of cross-references and the resetting of a chapter or even an entire book.

But preferences are not always possible to stick by if production schedules are to be met. Information often needs to be made available in a timely manner, say, for an event that a book is tied to. Rightsholders, unfortunately, are often notoriously slow about responding to reprint requests (and sometimes never respond at all or cannot be found). A lack of response leaves the author and the publisher in a situation where they have to make a decision regarding whether to take a calculated risk. Will the rightsholder eventually respond? Will the permission be granted and for a reasonable amount? Will the rightsholder emerge after publication and try to assert various demands then?

Complicating this decision is the law with regard to the doctrine of fair use. The fair use doctrine allows writers to use someone else’s work within his or her own if it meets certain criteria, as denoted here. The criteria take into account such questions as: In what ways might the use compromise the original owner’s ability sell his or her own work? Is the use for profit or nonprofit? Is the use contributing or essential to a scholarly discussion or is it more ornamental? How much of the other person’s work is being used? Does this new use transform the original in such a way that a new, distinctly creative product has resulted that does not simply cannibalize the original?

The law with regard to fair use is, in practice, ambiguous. This means that any publisher who chooses to disseminate even a small portion of someone else’s work as part of yet another work risks a lawsuit from the original owner. In general, most writers feel confident that a lawsuit will not result (or that they’d easily win if one did result) when they quote a short passage from someone else’s longer work. Here, the doctrine of fair use is well established.

Confidence fades, however, when the answers to those questions are borderline. Does the full quotation of a four-line poem constitute fair use, for example, if that quote is appearing in a book of criticism about that poet or poem, or is the author essentially robbing the poet of remuneration owed for the reprinting of the poem?

And so we’ve ended up with situations at UGA Press such as one in which an author had to pull a quote from his book because a lyricist told him he was not free to quote from her song, even though, had the risk-averse author simply quoted the lyric and claimed fair use, he probably would have seen no repercussions. Or another situation in which an author wrote an essay about music from the Vietnam War without using any quotes from the songs whatsoever, because, of course, lyrics are essentially very short poems and why bother risking having the RIAA after you? As the publisher in these situations, it’s easy to take a stand with the authors of the critical works; however, as the publisher also of various creative works, it’s easy to see how we might not take kindly to another publisher reprinting in complete or almost complete form one of our own works, even though it might be for critical or scholarly ends. After all, one might argue, we took the financial risk to bring that work to the public’s attention, and now this other publisher is cannibalizing on the author’s success.

Where such issues become difficult for production is when items that would appear to be available for use become unavailable—or become the subject of scrutiny. That photo on page 24, for example, which is a publicity still from a motion picture, suddenly has a two-thousand-dollar price tag on it from a movie studio that was formerly unresponsive to efforts to request permission. But does the author even need permission (the author analyzes the shot as part of the scholarly discussion)? If we remove the photo, what goes in its place? Or do we reset the entire book? Is the author willing to risk a lawsuit?

Such questions bring us back to the contradictions within the concept of copyright itself and the way that publishers walk that line between as purveyors of knowledge who want strong copyright protection to ensure the continuing uniqueness of their own work but also the ability to use others’ works to further the scholarly end of spreading yet more knowledge.

Courtship Correspondence: The Letters from Practical Strangers, Week I

This summer we’re launching New Perspectives on the Civil War Era, a new series dedicated to the publication of primary sources (letters, diaries, speeches, etc.) of the Civil War era from a wide diversity of perspectives—respecting the soldier’s voice, but not privileging it over every other as is the case in most such edited volumes. The first volume in the series is Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln edited by Stephen Berry and Angela Esco Elder. 

With texting, Snap Chat, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, it can be difficult to appreciate what it used to feel like—the worry, the anticipation, the excitement—for long-awaited letters to arrive, especially for those engaged in courtship. In an effort to simulate the sort of anticipation Dawson and Todd might have felt, we’re running a new blog series meant to reintroduce a forgotten but important ingredient of correspondence: time. So each week between now and publication we will feature a letter by Dawson or Todd, followed the next week by the letter’s response. To add another layer of anachronism to the fun, be sure to follow Nathaniel and Elodie on Twitter!

From Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd: Alabama River, April 26, 1861

I do not know that I can better express my appreciation of the goodness of my gentle and dear Elodie, in being present, this morning, to bid me goodby and God speed, than by writing her a few hurried lines. For I know that to hold communion with her is the sweetest of all pleasures.

We are speeding on our way over the water, and at each revolution of the wheels, the distance between us is lengthened, but the ties which bind us are only increased. I watched you until you passed from my sight in the distance, and saw with pleasure that tho smiles wreathed your face, it was done to cheer and to animate one whose heart was almost bursting with sadness. But I must not indulge these feelings, but must turn to the brighter visions that flit across the mind at the hope of future happiness and our union in those solemn bonds that will make us one in all things. Like Ruth thy country shall be my country, my God shall be your God, and your people shall be my people, and we will have to appreciate in happiness the deferred visions of Hope. Am I not fighting for you, am I not your sworn knight and soldier? If so, you must bid me God speed.

I requested Mr. Dennis to get some of my hardiest geranium plants to have them sent to you. Will you blame me again? I wish these fragrant flowers to be the silent, living witnesses of my love, and I know you will water and cultivate them as the living memorials of my constant fidelity to your heart.

I think our friend, the ex-Lieutenant, is now convinced that I am in love with you. He evidently was shocked at the tableau of last night and seems to have all of the feelings of a jealous nature aroused. But I do not blame him [n]or do I dislike him for loving the same dear and noble lady whom I worship. I will never feel pained at your receiving the attention of any gentleman but am rather pleased. For I am willing and anxious that the beams of the sun which reflect upon me should warm others into happiness. I have no hesitancy in saying that I have confidence that can never be shaken—the same in your love and truth that the follower of Mohammet has in his prophet. We have a large and noisy crew aboard, and what with the noise, frequent interruptions, and the shaking of the boat, I can hardly write, but I know you will take the trouble to read what is written. We will reach Mongom’y tonight, and in a few days will leave for Lynchburg Va. I will write you very frequently, if only a hurried line. I fear you will object to my frequent letters. Your love will make me a stronger and better man, able to resist the vices of a campaign life. And now, good bye. Again, I commend you to God and subscribe myself your own attached,

The Letters from Practical Strangers, Week 2: A Letter from Elodie

This summer we’re launching New Perspectives on the Civil War Era, a new series dedicated to the publication of primary sources (letters, diaries, speeches, etc.) of the Civil War era from a wide diversity of perspectives—respecting the soldier’s voice, but not privileging it over every other as is the case in most such edited volumes. The first volume in the series is Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln edited by Stephen Berry and Angela Esco Elder. 

With texting, Snap Chat, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, it can be difficult to appreciate what it used to feel like—the worry, the anticipation, the excitement—for long-awaited letters to arrive, especially for those engaged in courtship. In an effort to simulate the sort of anticipation Dawson and Todd might have felt, we’re running a new blog series meant to reintroduce a forgotten but important ingredient of correspondence: time. So each week between now and publication we will feature a letter by Dawson or Todd, followed the next week by the letter’s response. To add another layer of anachronism to the fun, be sure to follow Nathaniel and Elodie on Twitter!

From Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson: Selma, May 2, 1861

Sister Matt and Miss M. (14) have gone this evening to witness the presentation of two flags to the five companies. I did not feel as tho’ I could go thro’ another such scene so soon, besides preferred staying at home to write to you, which will now be my greatest pleasure after receiving your own communications. My brother (15) returned from Montgomery yesterday morning, remained with us sufficient length of time to bid us goodbye. He succeeded in getting the appointment or commission (I don’t know which I should say) of 1st lieutenant with promise of promotion to a captaincy before three months elapse. Parting with him, together with the information of the departure of my two other brothers (16) for the war and the deplorable state of affairs in Kentucky, has made me sad. Our dear old state is poorly provided with arms and ammunition, and all attempts to supply the deficiency thus far have proved a failure, for what they ordered has been seized by the state of Ohio. Another trouble is the division in political sentiment. What is to be the fate of home? I cannot divine and will not think Kentucky, whose name has been written with pride and honor on History’s page, must now be dimmed and dishonored, untrue to herself and her noble sister states. (17)

The Blues are making more music and commotion about going to the War than when you left. (18) The church bells ring two or three times a day to call the ladies together in order to form arrangements concerning the making up of 110 uniforms for the chivalrous corps, who are so determined to fight their country’s battles that rather than remain at home they intend going on their own expenses and responsibility. I hope you and your company will soon do your fighting and make way for this noble band who I doubt not will return their brows crowned with laurels. Mr. Dennis leaves tomorrow for New Orleans. I dislike really to see him go as he positively declares Bro. Clem must accompany him, and I believe he has consented to do so. I would not give Mr. D. permission to carry out the order you gave him regarding the flowers. I think your sending Bouquets twice a week is sufficient to gratify my taste for flowers.

[illegible] Hagood (19) has made his appearance twice but takes especial delight in being agreeable and polite to all save myself to whom he is cold and haughty. I am only waiting for him to recover his usual good and amiable disposition before I retaliate with cool dignity. I am writing you a long, dull letter and am not conscious of what I have written, owing to the many interruptions which have occurred since I began . . . Laura says I have been writing long enough to have accomplished 13 letters and must stop as she and Matt have talked themselves completely out just beside me all the time, but it seems as tho’ my pen is as eager to continue as myself. However, I must now finish. Hoping to hear from you very soon, believe me

Book Blowout 2017: Huge Sale Happening Right Now!

Get amazing bargains on more than 600 titles on all kinds of subjects—at discounts up to 70%!

The details:

• Two easy ways to shop:
  • – For traditional page-by-page browsing,view the sale catalog here.
  • – For greater searching, sorting, and filtering options, view the sale titles here.
• When you’re ready to order, go here for final purchase.
• Sale ends July 15, 2017.
• This is an online-only sale.
• You must enter this code during checkout to get the bargain prices: 08BLOWOUT
• Orders over $25.00 will be shipped free (USPS media mail, in US only). Other shipping options are available during checkout.
• Quantities on some titles are limited, so order early!

I do not know when we will be one, nor do I know our destination. Can’t you prevail upon your brother-in-law, A. L., to change his policy & make peace?

This summer we’re launching New Perspectives on the Civil War Era, a new series dedicated to the publication of primary sources (letters, diaries, speeches, etc.) of the Civil War era from a wide diversity of perspectives—respecting the soldier’s voice, but not privileging it over every other as is the case in most such edited volumes. The first volume in the series is Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln edited by Stephen Berry and Angela Esco Elder. 

With texting, Snap Chat, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, it can be difficult to appreciate what it used to feel like—the worry, the anticipation, the excitement—for long-awaited letters to arrive, especially for those engaged in courtship. In an effort to simulate the sort of anticipation Dawson and Todd might have felt, we’re running a new blog series meant to reintroduce a forgotten but important ingredient of correspondence: time. So each week between now and publication we will feature a letter by Dawson or Todd, followed the next week by the letter’s response. To add another layer of anachronism to the fun, be sure to follow Nathaniel and Elodie on Twitter!

From Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd: Camp near Lynchburg, May 8, 1861

I have read repeatedly your sweet letter of May 2d and hope my dear Elodie will indulge frequently in the pleasure of writing. It is to me a luxury to read anything from you here, and I do not flatter you when I tell you that your heart must be full of goodness to write as you do, so easily, sweetly, sensibly. I love you too well to flatter as our relations are now too close to permit us to indulge in it. You must express your own feelings freely because it is a happiness to know that you are willing to confide them to me. I would speak all my thoughts aloud to you, and, as I have told you, I have as much confidence in your fidelity as I have in the existence of the world. How so pure and gentle a being could be willing to confide the keeping of her affections and her happiness to me is frequently a subject of reflection, and I confess the enigma remains unsolved.

We began our duties today in earnest. I rose at daylight, attended officers drill from six to eight, breakfasted at eight, mounted guard at nine, acting as officer of the day, drilled from nine to twelve, and in the interval am writing you this letter using the pen you gave me. This morning I plucked from the side of the mountain the wild violets which are enclosed. They cover the ground, and there is a blue flower, which covers the ground in clusters like the oxalis. Does John (25) supply you with flowers? I intended him to do so.

I am very anxious to hear from your mother, and I hope she will interpose no objections. What would you do if she did? I would feel very badly and deeply chagrined.

I hope to return safely to claim your hand, and if I do not you will always know that I have regarded you, in all things save the ceremonials of the Law, as mine. At this point, I have just been handed your letter of 3d May, (26) which I have read with renewed pleasure. You are a noble woman, worthy of all my love, and I should bless Heaven you have promised to be mine.

I do not know when we will be one, nor do I know our destination. Can’t you prevail upon your brother-in-law, A. L., to change his policy & make peace? It would add greatly to our happiness. I have thought that in case of the continuance of the war during the year that I might with your consent, during the summer, obtain a furlough and return to claim your hand, if you will consent to do so. To wait for a long, weary year [for] the fulfillment of all our hopes is hard. Are you willing to share my dangers and my privations? I dare to ask you, as I love you too well to have you subjected to them. You could remain at home and get some one to stay with you in our home. I wish to see you there as its mistress. It would be pleasant perhaps to spend the summer in Va. near our
camp in company with Mrs. Hardie. (27) What do you answer to this my dear angel, Elodie?

Should you not agree to this cheerfully, don’t hesitate to decline as I know you will have good reasons for anything that you do. I love you so truly and so well that if you were to decline to marry me at all, I would not have the desire to blame you, though it would almost craze me.

I long to be in a condition to gratify all my wishes in respect to your happiness without your having it in your power to decline allowing me to do so. My heart is full when I think that fortune may still separate us. But even in Heaven, I will be able to claim that you gave me your love on earth.

Goodby dear girl, sweet Elodie. Write me frequently. God keep and preserve you always is my prayer.

Affectionately your own,