From Ghost Town To Havana – a film

A new documentary film being made by Eugene Corr.

"In the summer of 2006, three unarmed kids were gunned down on an Oakland street. Roscoe Bryant, 44 at the time, ran out of his house. One of the boys, Thomas, 15, died in his arms. Roscoe, the father of two boys himself, decided he had to do something. As an alternative to the gangs and violence engulfing his Ghost Town neighborhood, he started the Oakland Royals baseball team. We've been following the story of Coach Roscoe and his players for the past three and a half years." – Eugene Corr

I have long been touched by the despair that resides in the sad existences suffered by inner city kids, who, through no fault of their own, with no nuclear family and no role models except "Rap Stars", drug dealers and other criminals in their respective communities are presented with nothing positive and useful upon which to base their futures.

I believe a compelling lesson can be learned from Eugene Corr's film, “From Ghost Town To Havana” and that is that, if the sad, dangerous and wasteful things are going to be changed in the many neighborhoods like Ghost Town (this film focuses on West Oakland, California, but there are Ghost Towns in every one of our larger cities), mentors are needed and needed badly. The film's purpose is to show that more Roscoes ( learn about him in the trailer) can make a difference.

I spent the week of July 10 – 15, in Berkeley, California, pro bono, to learn more about the film from "Gene" and his associate producer and its needs – which as you might expect is money, needed to complete the full translation from Spanish and final editing. The film's cost was front loaded and still needs about $200,000 to finish with the translation and final editing so it can find a public audience with PBS, HBO or other similar venues.

If you find "From Ghost Town To Havana" can be an important vehicle to make a difference and you can make a 501(c)(3) tax deductible contribution, we will be grateful and hopefully some kids will have a better shot at improving their lives through the film's mentoring objectives.

I invite you to review this inspiring film’s trailer here:

http://playtwopictures.com/

Red Light Lullaby

Ruby Friedman / Nick Page

‎1912, Storyville prostitutes, New Orleans

From the New Yorker

"Set a Spell"

Click on for a larger photo:


July 1939. Gordonton, N.C. "Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon. Note kerosene pump on the right and the gasoline pump on the left. Rough, unfinished timber posts have been used as supports for porch roof. Negro men sitting on the porch. Brother of store owner stands in doorway."

Photo by: Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) she was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

North American Indians (Denver Post Series)

In 1906, American photographer Edward S. Curtis was offered $75,000 to document North American Indians. The benefactor, J.P Morgan, was to receive 25 sets of the completed series of 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs entitled The North American Indian. Curtis set out to photograph the North American Indian way of life at a time when Native Americans were being forced from their land and stripped of their rights. Curtis’ photographs depicted a romantic version of the culture which ran contrary to the popular view of Native Americans as savages.


More Remarkable Native American Indians via The Denver Post's "plog".

3 Father Poems by Meg Pokrass

Meg is a friend of mine. Her recently released book, Damn Sure Right is getting brilliant, rave reviews and is available from Amazon and leading bookstores everywhere. She is one of the brightest, most creative people I have ever read... or known.

Father Poems

by Meg Pokrass

no proof exists

my dark father
was human though
no proof exists

his photographs
were torn in two
then four then eight
his face in the trash

pieces slipping

near each other
becoming
who I wanted him to be

my father never loved us but I loved him madly when I was three

riding his shoulders
grabbing his hands

seeing from above
how breakable
we really were

Before Dusk, Autumn

The two kites went up
into the late afternoon.
One of them, then the other.

I was locked in the car
while Dad and my cousin, Mamie
swirled the field.
Mamie, watching her shadow grow,
looked embarrassed.

I watched through the window-
The kites were leaves,
wind picking them up,
grabbing them.

As shadows spread
Dad must have remembered
that I was his daughter,
that it was my birthday.

Piggy Back

“Let's go
for a piggy back ride!”
He
draped me
over him
like a sweater.
Shouldered safely
I let my hands
explore
his face
and found
two caterpillars.
He told me
to feel his chin,
how it was
like sandpaper.
Everything
was
BIG,
HAIRY,
TERRIBLE
(laughing high above his face).


___

My friend, Meg told me, "Fathers really are a rich source. My mother and I left my father when I was five, I never saw him again, so I had many years to think about the memories."

About Meg:

Meg Pokrass writes flash-fiction, short stories and poetry. Damn Sure Right is her debut collection of flash fiction. Meg serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and before that, for SmokeLong Quarterly. Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications, including Mississippi Review, Gigantic, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, HTML Giant, Wigleaf, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Annalemma, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Prime Number, Women Writers and Joyland. Meg creates and runs the popular Fictionaut-Five Author Interview Series for Fictionaut and consults with Writing MFA programs about online publishing. Meg lives with her small, creative family and seven animals in San Francisco, where she edits and teaches flash fiction privately.

Another Side of Bruce Springsteen

w/ The Seeger Sessions Band

"If I Should Fall Behind" w/ wife, Patty Scialfa



"Oh, Mary Don't You Weep, Don't You Mourn"

Buying Cars Down South

New Orleans – John Stewart

A favorite song by an original member of the Kingston Trio, a '60s folk singing group. (R.I.P. 9/1939 – 1/ 2008)

And one would be hard-pressed to find a more poignant elegy for the pre-Hurricane Katrina Crescent City than “New Orleans,” with its heartbroken piano accompaniment a la Tom Waits and Randy Newman, regret-filled vocals, and lyrics that were largely written by John’s longtime wife, soulmate and sometime singing partner, Buffy Ford Stewart.



Another video of the song with great NOLA video.

Not a relation. I promise.

Watch it!

Meet Meg Pokrass and her Newest Book

Meg is a friend of mine and I am anxiously awaiting the release of her new book, Damn Sure Right. It is scheduled to be released this February, 2011. She is one of the brightest, funny women I have ever read... or known.









Meg Pokrass writes flash-fiction, short stories and poetry. Damn Sure Right is her debut collection of flash fiction. Meg serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and before that, for SmokeLong Quarterly. Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications, including Mississippi Review, Gigantic, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, HTML Giant, Wigleaf, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Annalemma, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Prime Number, Women Writers, and Joyland. Meg creates and runs the popular Fictionaut-Five Author Interview Series for Fictionaut, and consults with Writing MFA programs about online publishing. Meg lives with her small, creative family and seven animals in San Francisco, where she edits and teaches flash fiction privately.

To view Meg's website – a great slide show review of her book with a sample story

To order a copy of her new book go here

Praise for her writing:

“Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving.”
– Frederick Barthelme
“Read Damn Sure Right, a collection of miniature tales sure to ruin your
waking hours the way you’ll want them ruined.”
— Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory
“Meg Pokrass’ flash fiction conveys entire worlds that are touching,
haunting, funny, moving and strange in the most beautiful ways.”
— Jessica Anya Blau, author of Drinking Closer to Home
“Meg Pokrass is the new monarch of the delightful and enigmatic tiny
kingdom of micro- and flash fiction.”
— Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
“Meg Pokrass is the brewmaster of flash.”
— Sean Lovelace, author of How Some People Like Their Eggs
“No one this side of Amy Hempel is more capable of saying more with
a handful of well-chosen words… and no one is better at stretching
language into such brilliant new hallucinatory shapes.”
— Grant Bailie, author of Morta rville and Cloud 8
“I feel Pokrass thinking through her sentences, surprising herself, taking
chances. Some of her lines hover between the best stand-up comedy and
Dostoevsky.”
— James Robison, author of The Illustrator
“Pokrass’ unsettling, exciting approach to fl ash is indeed infectious.”
— Sam Rasnake, editor of Blue Fifth Review

Enjoy Caroline Herring

I think she's terrific!

About Her:

Caroline Herring is a Canton, Mississippi-born artist whose music has been hailed for combining traditional folk and bluegrass sounds with striking, original observations of modern life and love. Thoroughly steeped in southern culture, Herring began her music career in Austin, TX, where she released her first album, “Twilight,” and won Best New Artist in both the Austin American Statesman and Austin Chronicle in 2002. Since that time, Herring has built an international following and released three more albums, including the masterpiece “Golden Apples of the Sun.”

And learn about Walter Anderson

The critical acclaim for “Golden Apples of the Sun” firmly supports Herring’s status as one of the top musical artists of her generation. The Oxford American says, “Golden Apples is the album of a woman who has come into her powers as a singer-songwriter, claiming as her stomping ground the territory where folk meets alt-country.” NPR’s All Things Considered interviewed Caroline in January 2010 about the making of the record, and Jim Allen of All Music Guide said the following: “It's not easy being a great folksinger -- Kate Wolf, Linda Thompson, and Iris DeMent are some of the names on the short list, but ‘Golden Apples of the Sun’ makes a strong case for the addition of Caroline Herring.”

Herring’s album “Lantana” (2008) received widespread acclaim as an alt-country masterpiece. The Austin Chronicle proclaimed it to be “the best modern Southern Gothic album since Lucinda Williams’ Sweet Old World,” and NPR named it one of the “ten best folk albums of 2008.” On “Lantana,” Herring writes and sings about a myriad of southern topics, from a character in a Larry Brown novel to the infanticide and racism exposed by the dark and troubled life of Susan Smith. With “Golden Apples of the Sun” Herring stakes out new terrain, exchanging the country-influenced resonance of her previous albums for a sound inspired by the iconic female folk singers and songwriters of the 1960s and 70s.

Caroline Herring lives in Atlanta, with her husband and two young children.

For a lot more of Caroline's music, go here:

Opossum

Hurricane Katrina –Came Ashore on Monday, August 29, 2005

Click on(for a larger photo)



More Katrina with Narrative and more Photos

A Joan Baez favorite

All You Need to Know About Life.

Here's Looking at You Kid

Great Lyrics Here

Cartoon 10/10

Fireflies – Rhett Miller

Sorry, my mistake!

Sarah McLachlan

Yusoff, the Yak farmer

On facebook

Yustoff, Yak farmer

About Me

Basic Info

Sex:

Yes

Birthday:

Yes

Current City:

No city, farm

Hometown:

Yakutsk

Political Views:

What?

Religious Views:

What?

Bio

Siberian, height: 6' 8", weight: 1 medium Yak.

eyes: yes, brown, hair: yes white, Teeth: yes

Myers Briggs profile: INTJ

Favorite Quotations

Yak good, Polar Bear Bad

Work Yes

Education No

College: What?

High School: What?

Likes and Interests

Activities:

Fucking and yaks and farming and eating

Interests

Yes - see above

My Favorite Siberian Music

Best Bull Yak named: YAK-ob Schmirnoff

Montreal Die In

Photo and Narrative by photographer, Kreddible Trout. I think he has captured an interesting event here. He's a good, alert photographer.

montreal die in © Kreddible Trout Visiting my hometown of Montreal a while back I happened upon this. A mass die-in. Normally I get all the memos on protests in my vicinity, but I haven't lived in MTL in a decade so I'd no idea what I was about to bump into. I had spent the day shooting headshots for a good friend when I lucked out on this. We zigged when we might have zagged and I noticed a swarm of cyclists appearing in all directions. My Troutie senses started tingling... something was going on here. Next thing I knew, they stopped and dismounted. Right spot. Right time. Dozens of point and shoots and phones started snapping where they stood, I thought 'vantage point!' I was closer to the front so I b-lined it. I think I made a good choice.They were protesting the death of a cyclist onMontreal street. Killed by a motorist It was incredible. They shut down Rue Ste. Catherine. in the late afternoon on a Saturday. Closed the city for ten minutes. It was beautiful. I would say that it made a lot of Montreal motorists unreasonably angry, but that would mean the protesters really had no effect.

New York City from Above

Click through this slide show below –

provided by The Denver Post.

Captured: New York City from Above – Plog Photo Blog

Meet Ferron – A Canadian-born Folksinger

My favorite song of hers:

"Ferron writes of love with the relentless introspection of Leonard Cohen, and, as with classic Bob Dylan, her songs' tough, questioning attitude sometimes gives way to an unexpected." - Rolling Stone Magazine

When Canadian singer-songwriter Ferron was 15, she hit the road alone. She had a single shopping bag with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a waitress uniform, and a Leonard Cohen LP. Little did she know then, but one day her own songs would be compared to Cohen's for their depth of word-craft, intimacy, and wisdom. (NPR)

Ferron's Website

Wild And Free

Vedran Vidak, Photographer

From: Imotski, Croatia

The photographer's Narrative:

On the vast pastures of untouched nature Livno field, only ten kilometers away from the town of Livno, relaxing peace that rules the area impairs gallop over two hundred wild horses! That way they inflict on the area has been circulating since Koritine to Pine head, impress the stunning scenery herds of wild horses, in search of good grass, salt and water a day and go to the tenth kilometers. Wild horses on these pastures, almost fifty years of living under the open sky, left to themselves, weather conditions, strong winters and attacking wild animals in the surrounding woods is a lot. Survive only thanks to regions that are rich grass.

Wild Horses

Peace

Winter Comes

A Lynching 91 Years Ago, August 7, 1930 in Marion, Indiana

The photograph below was cited by the songwriter as the inspiration for the song: "Strange Fruit" which began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of the two black men.

The song, "Strange Fruit" has been covered by Nina Simone, Jeff Buckley and others.

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were two African-American men who were lynched on August 7, 1930 in Marion, Indiana. They had been arrested the night before, charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker and raping his girlfriend. A large crowd broke into the jail with sledgehammers, beat the two men, and hanged them. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching. A third person, 16 year old James Cameron, narrowly escaped lynching thanks to an unidentified participant who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. A studio photographer, Lawrence Beitler, took a photograph of the dead bodies hanging from a tree surrounded by a large crowd.

Cameron, the third person, stated in interviews that Shipp and Smith had, in fact, started to rob a white man, who was later found shot. He says that he fled when he realized what was going on. The police accused all three men of murder and rape.
Much more info in an NPR article, Linked here.

Trepagnier House – St. Charles, Louisiana

The Trepagnier Plantation was expropriated, along with several others, by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to build the Bonnet Carre' Spillway.

Per Frances E. Johnson, the Photographer – 1938
"St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. 'The Rookery', Trepagnier House. Norco vicinity. Abandoned plantation house now occupied by Negroes."
Photo courtesy of Shorpy.com.


From the front porch view, it looks like the home of a laundress.

Additional Photos of the Trepagnier House by Lee Russell in the Library of Congress archives. FSA and WPA Photography

Blues in the South – Photos and Music

Brief Bio of photographer, George Mitchell

George Mitchell was born in Coral Gables, Florida in 1944. He was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and in 1958 discovered by accident the two radio stations in Atlanta that played black music, WAOK, and WERD, the first black-owned station in the US. Mitchell was drawn to black music, and as a teenager listened intently to Samuel B. Charters’ anthology The Country Blues. He also went to blues and R&B shows and saw Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and the Staple Singers with his grandmother in tow; they were the only white people at that performance. George's obsession with photographing and recording country blues players in the Southeast has allowed their tradition to survive.George Mitchell resides in Atlanta with his wife Cathy.

Pulling up to a Stuckey's in Senatobia, Miss., in 1967, Mitchell was looking for well-known bluesman Fred McDowell, who had recorded extensively and toured Europe. He asked the attendant pumping gas where to find McDowell. "You're looking at him," the attendant said. GEORGE MITCHELL

William Grant, seen here at his home in Pittsview, Ala., was adept as a solo harmonica player, alternating singing and harp-playing with great agility. GEORGE MITCHELL

More Snapshots of Blues in the South

By George Mitchell

Some of the music? OK. Hang on!:
John Lee Hooker – Tupelo

Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Little Walter — My Babe

When Sheepdogs Get Bored

They Play Leapfrog –

So Long, Drive-In Movies

At their peak, which most experts agree was in 1958, there were almost 5000 drive-ins. Today, there are only 372 drive-in theaters still open in the US.

Remembering the Drive-Ins properly demands some Bob Seger music.

Hores

Billboard

Sign of the times:

Model T Ford Postcard – 1928

Offering Mechanic Services.


Click on:


Notice the sophisticated addressing scheme! This was sent on a penny postcard. Of course, it's all relative. A dollar was hard to come by in 1928.

Roadrunner Cartoon

By Seth MacFarlane, creator of TVs Family Guy and other comedy. I think his stuff is hilarious.

Deliverance

Welcome to Atlanta – Old and New

Slide show with music. Long, but well done.

More from Brad Watson

The below Narrative Magazine story, In the Prime of Their Lives is but part of Brad's novella which is in his excellent new book of stories:
"Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives"

Click on this link to read this delightful story.

“SHE WAS A GOOD Baptist girl, but she wasn’t a prude, and she liked to drink a beer here and there, and go to parties, and she generally liked my rowdy crowd. She was a virgin, though, and determined to stay one until she married.”

Biographical Information

Brad Watson was born and grew up in Meridian, Miss. He became interested in theater in high school, and, after graduation, went to California to look for work in Hollywood as a set-builder. Unable to find a movie job due to a strike, Watson worked as a garbage collector. After about a year, he returned to Meridian and worked in a variety of jobs, including carpentry and bartending. He also attended Meridian Junior College, where he became interested in writing. Watson earned a BA in English at Mississippi State University in Starkville in 1978. He then enrolled at the University of Alabama, earning an MFA in creative writing and American literature in 1985. In the mid-1980s, Watson also worked for a weekly newspaper on the Gulf Coast. He later wrote for the Montgomery Advertiser and for an advertising agency in Montgomery.

From 1988 to 1997, Watson was employed by the University of Alabama as an instructor and as a writer in the public relations office. During this time, he was also writing short stories. Several were published in literary journals such as The Greensboro Review and Story. A collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, was published in 1996. The following year, Watson moved to Massachusetts where he held a five-year appointment as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University. He published a novel, The Heaven of Mercury, in 2002. Watson then moved to Pensacola, where he was writer-in-residence for a year at the University of West Florida. He spent a semester teaching at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before being appointed the John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 2005, Watson became a member of the English faculty of the University of Wyoming and moved to Laramie.

Interests and Themes

Brad Watson’s fiction is set in the South and frequently involves failed interpersonal relationships. Last Days of the Dog-Men is a collection of short stories about dogs and people. The Heaven of Mercury is set in a fictional town that is based partly on his hometown of Meridian, Miss., and partly on Alabama Gulf Coast towns like Foley and Gulf Shores.

Want to learn more about Brad? This is an excellent 2002 interview that really draws him out.

How 'bout some Jackson Browne?

Soundstage 1976 – The Pretender



One more: "The Load Out/Stay", also BBC 1978

Two Romanian Photographers

Michaela Cojocariu – Her Blog

"Wrong Written Life"

"Frida is Back" –

A photographic portrayal of Mexican painter and wife of painter, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo.

George Gradinanaru – signs his work, "Horhhe"

"Night traveller III"

Both of these talented photographers are from

Brasov, Transsilvania, Romania

Listen to Caroline Herring

I think she's terrific!

About Her:

Caroline Herring is a Canton, Mississippi-born artist whose music has been hailed for combining traditional folk and bluegrass sounds with striking, original observations of modern life and love. Thoroughly steeped in southern culture, Herring began her music career in Austin, TX, where she released her first album, “Twilight,” and won Best New Artist in both the Austin American Statesman and Austin Chronicle in 2002. Since that time, Herring has built an international following and released three more albums, including the masterpiece “Golden Apples of the Sun.” The critical acclaim for “Golden Apples of the Sun” firmly supports Herring’s status as one of the top musical artists of her generation. The Oxford American says, “Golden Apples is the album of a woman who has come into her powers as a singer-songwriter, claiming as her stomping ground the territory where folk meets alt-country.” NPR’s All Things Considered interviewed Caroline in January 2010 about the making of the record, and Jim Allen of All Music Guide said the following: “It's not easy being a great folksinger -- Kate Wolf, Linda Thompson, and Iris DeMent are some of the names on the short list, but ‘Golden Apples of the Sun’ makes a strong case for the addition of Caroline Herring.” Herring’s album “Lantana” (2008) received widespread acclaim as an alt-country masterpiece. The Austin Chronicle proclaimed it to be “the best modern Southern Gothic album since Lucinda Williams’ Sweet Old World,” and NPR named it one of the “ten best folk albums of 2008.” On “Lantana,” Herring writes and sings about a myriad of southern topics, from a character in a Larry Brown novel to the infanticide and racism exposed by the dark and troubled life of Susan Smith. With “Golden Apples of the Sun” Herring stakes out new terrain, exchanging the country-influenced resonance of her previous albums for a sound inspired by the iconic female folk singers and songwriters of the 1960s and 70s. Caroline Herring lives in Atlanta, with her husband and two young children.

For a lot more of Caroline's music, go here:

Elvis was generous.

Some said to a fault.

Click on:

"Bloodroot" by Amy Greene - NYT review

Cold Mountains

BLOODROOT
By Amy Greene
291 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95

$15.97 on Amazon ( per DNJ )

New York Times
By LISA FUGARD

Published: February 12, 2010

Don’t be misled by the dreamy pastoral image on the dust jacket of Amy Greene’s first novel. “Bloodroot” takes place in Appalachia, and, yes, Greene lovingly describes its mountains and hollows, its waters filled with bluegills. There’s also much talk of healing and magic and backwoods folk wisdom. But this story is really about the fraught, sometimes dangerous, bonds between children and their mothers, and the appalling spillover of violence from one generation to the next.

A scene about halfway through, when a pregnant Laura Odom Blevins is being harassed by her wildly possessive, drink-addled mother-in-law, captures this dark legacy with wrenching clarity. “I ain’t never had nobody,” the older woman sobs, after she’s finished hurling insults. “When I was little they was always passing me around. Didn’t none of them want me.” But the pity Laura momentarily feels is banished when her mother-in-law grabs a jack handle and begins smashing Laura’s husband’s car. “I was sorry,” a shaken Laura confesses after another tussle sends the woman limping away, “but most of all I was worried about my baby. I thought something had broke inside me, the way it broke in Mama.”

Laura’s mother, black-haired, blue-eyed Myra Lamb, is one of the characters the novel follows through three generations of domestic strife. She’s first encountered through the recollections of Byrdie, the grandmother who raises her on Bloodroot Mountain, and Doug Cotter, a shy young neighbor who falls in love with her — both of whom feel her slipping away, lured by an ominously attractive man named John Odom. Although Greene strains a bit in these passages, using the awkward symbolism of Wild Rose, a horse that can’t be tamed, to echo Myra’s free spirit, she succeeds in capturing the intimate relationships many of her characters have with the natural world. “The whole mountain belonged to us,” Doug declares, “and we knew its terrain like our own bodies, every scar and cleft and fold.”

In unadorned but assured prose, Greene then takes her readers to the hard­scrabble world of foster homes and juvenile detention centers, of life in a blue-collar Appalachian town as experienced by Myra’s children, the twins Laura and Johnny. While Laura struggles to move beyond the traumas of their childhood — when social workers removed them from their mother’s home — Johnny can’t forget the years they spent with the reclusive Myra. At one point, he hikes up Bloodroot Mountain with a friend who has promised to show him a witch’s house. Dilapidated, hidden among the trees, it looks “like a toy I could hold in both hands, a dirty white box with black window holes and the roof a flake of blood.” It’s his childhood home, and the witch in question is his mother.

When, in the novel’s last section, Myra’s voice is finally heard — searching back for the first “whispers of fear” she felt after meeting John Odom — the effect is chilling. Here Greene uses gothic overtones (sometimes too heavily) to capture the crippling atmosphere of Myra’s marriage. The smell of sulphur and dead rats permeates the air outside the Odom house; her sisters-in-law are “tired and colorless”; her husband looks “almost foreign, hair and eyes black as soot.” She captures well the electric emotional snap of a woman about to break free from an abusive marriage, the charge of adrenaline in that “exhilarating moment when I knew it would end for me one way or another.”

Greene layers the novel with references to Myra’s incredible magnetism, and it’s said she has “the touch,” a kind of ESP. There’s also mention of a family curse. But this somehow detracts from the tragedy of her life. Myra is most compelling as an all too ordinary woman trying to escape an inheritance of violence and poverty. “It’s not right, what we’ve put on her,” one character remarks. “She’s made out of flesh and blood, just like anybody else.”

Lisa Fugard is the author of a novel, “Skinner’s Drift.”