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I was born on the banks of
the Yazoo River in Leflore County,
Mississippi, which is not quite as prosaic as it sounds because that is
simply where
the Greenwood-Leflore County Hospital is located, right on the
riverbank on the west side of Greenwood.
The Delta is an area of remorsely flat land in northwest Mississippi.
It is shaped somewhat like a spearhead with one end at Memphis,
Tennessee, and the other at Vicksburg and is roughly 200 miles long and
87 miles across at its widest point. The Delta is actually an alluvial
floodplain encompassed by the Mississippi River to the west and the
Yazoo River to the east totaling nealy 7,000 square miles of some of
the best land in the world for growing cotton.
The Delta is brutally hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and humid
all year round. It is a land of great wealth and heartbreaking poverty
existing side by side. It is a polyglot of races and cultures that
somehow manage to get along with each other a little more often than
not. It is a place filled with warm friendly, open-handed people
capable of deep, fierce, sometimes violent passions. It is where the Blues were born.
Our
family lived in Greenwood until I was eight years old when we left the
Mississippi Delta for the Hill
Country of northeast Mississippi and a little town called Tupelo.
But that was not the end of my time in the Delta.My
father was from a familiy of eight, my mother from a family of
ten. I had aunts, uncles, and cousins the length and breadth of
the Delta. Both of my grandfathers and many of my uncles were
cotton planters. We spent a lot of time in the Delta visiting family.
In addition to all of our family visits, I spent many of my childhood summers with my father's parents on a small
farm 2 1/2 miles north of Brazil in Tallahatchie County. These visits
continued well into my high school years. These two wonderful and indulgent grandparents, both born of the
19th century, were willing to tell and retell
old, old stories, family tales, and stories that touched on every admirable, as well as base,
human trait. I was a sponge absorbing all of them that I could.
My
formal
education veered from
engineering to studio art to religion to philosophy and back to
religion, all of which oddly enough led me to a career in Information
Technology.
Always
an
avid reader, I wrote occasionally for my
own pleasure, and one year as
a Christmas gift for my young nieces, I wrote, illustrated, and had
printed a short memoir about my dog Scrappy and life on my
grandparents’ farm during my
childhood.
That
little book
proved to be so popular with family and friends (admittedly not the
harshest of
critics), that after over 30 years in IT and with the support of my
wife Sherrie, I turned my back on the corporate world to devote myself
to writing.
And that opened the floodgates.
At this point, I have completed two volumes of memoirs, three novels,
one novella, and a collection of outdoor adventures. I am also plotting
out two more novels and expandeing the novella into a novel.
And
of course, I still read. Ever
since I could make sense out of a page of text, I have taken to heart
William Faulkner's
advice to "Read, read, read. Read everything - trash,
classics, good and bad,
and see how they do it". And although
I read everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs
and Isaac
Asimov
to Lee Child and Ian Fleming, from natural history to military history,
from biography to cosmology, from Tolstoy to Melville to Twain, my very
favorite authors, the
ones I go back to time and again, are Faulkner, Cormac
McCarthy, Charles Frazier, and Patrick O'Brian. Lately I have
been
reading a lot of Lin Enger, Jeffery Lent, and Donna Tartt. And I must
admit
that Thomas Pynchon continues to grow on me.
When
Sherrie and I married, I gained not just a wonderful wife but an
instant family in her outstanding young, teenaged twin sons.
They are both grown and married now with children of
their own. Sherrie and I have made our home in North Carolina
since 1998.
© 2017-2024 jgcatledge studios
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