Table Scraps and Other Essays
Ebook
Overview
Table Scraps and Other Essays is for all intents and purposes memoir writing. At the heart of the twenty-two true stories is an African American female who, as a child, along with her siblings, must learn the value of hard work as hired hands. James’s young spirit is often at odds with her growing family, especially with a father figure who ignores his duties as husband and provider. She has a strong, loving mother who insists on keeping the family together. James learns to trust and depend on the “guardians” of her small Louisiana community--teachers who are eventually forced to move away from the area when the local schools are integrated. Many years later, James returns home figuratively, and literally on occasion, from the apartment where she lives in New Orleans, and reconnects with a father who seeks forgiveness for his earlier betrayal. He spends each day attempting to make up for the ill treatment of his wife and children. In these essays, James shares her love of nature, both as a means of escape from her troubled family and as inspiration for her writing.
“On her graceful path to the truth, Juyanne James travels
through a vivid landscape of humor, blues, and a vivid kind of
personal revelation available only in a rare writer. . . . James
brings the reader not only into her upbringing in rural Louisiana,
but into the heart of a family, with all its challenges,
complexities, and, above all, love.”
—David Rutledge, author of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New
Orleans?
“Table Scraps is a memoir resolute in its beauty, achieving
the impossible yet essential: it enters so wholly and gloriously
into that region of immemorial love, both universal and
entirely intimate, at once exile and Eden. James’s prose sings as
it rises and dips along the many perfumed gardens of time, carving
within us the prophetic, the holy, and the secret yet inimitable
wisdom of the child. Here the invisible is visible, and grace
is the experience.”
—Caitlin Gilson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of
Holy Cross
“Table Scraps is a collage of memory whose composite forms a
heartfelt search for meaning and understanding through familial
histories. James weaves prose and poetry into a tapestry of rich
memoir forming this collection rooted in southern lore and
circumstance.”
—CoCo Harris, Founding Editor, Telling Our Stories
Press
“Set in the cathedral of the southern landscape and rural
life of Sunny Hill, Louisiana . . . the stories told here move me
with an appreciation for food, music, God, nature, and the
overriding goodness in all of us.”
—Carol Scott, Professor Emeritus, University of Holy
Cross
- Title: Table Scraps and Other Essays
- Authors: Juyanne James, Randy Bates
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781725251755, 9781725251731, 9781725251748, 1725251752, 1725251736, 1725251744
- Resource ID: LLS:9781725251755
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T20:17:45Z
Juyanne James is an associate professor of English at the
University of Holy Cross in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has
authored The Persimmon Trail and Other Stories; her stories
and essays have appeared in journals such as The Louisville
Review, Mythium, Bayou Magazine, Eleven
Eleven, Thrice, and Ponder Review, and included
in the anthologies New Stories from the South: 2009 and
Something in the Water: 20 Louisiana Stories. “Table Scraps”
was a notable inclusion in The Best American Essays
(2014).