While Lewis Nordan was flying off his front porch in Itta Bena wearing a Superman cape, Ida Mae Holland was “play acting” Casey at the Bat on neighborhood porches in Greenwood most Saturdays. Memories of growing up in Leflore County brought both writers to center stage at the seventh Oxford Conference for the Book at the University in early April.

Buddy Nordan, whose fictionalized memoir Boy with Loaded Gun was published in January, and Endesha Ida Mae “Cat” Holland, a playwright who turned her off-Broadway production From the Mississippi Delta into a 1997 book, participated on the Southern Autobiography panel. Other panelists were Constance W. Curry of Atlanta, who assembled the memoir Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, and Maine poet Anthony Walton, author of Mississippi: An American Journey. Rick Bragg, author of All Over but the Shoutin’, canceled because of obligations as the New York Times bureau chief in Miami. “This book is the hardest and scariest thing I have ever done,” Nordan said, “because nobody stands between me and the reader; a memoir is out there more than any other form of writing. I didn’t know how my wife and friends would react seeing themselves portrayed and having their lives interpreted. I used revelations that could have been painful to others; I’ve had to deal with what people thought of me afterwards.”

After asking his wife to read chapters of his book, Nordan would sleep on the couch for a couple of nights, then make the writing changes that she suggested. “I needed to tell my story, but autobiography is not an economical form of therapy,” he said.

Nordan remembered, “Sometimes I sat at the computer and cried; I had to tell things I did not want to tell and they hurt. Since I see every element of my life, even the terrible, through comic lenses, I wondered if I would crack apart having to view tragic events through that distortion.”

While his previous publications--short story collections and the novels Music of the Swamp, Wolf Whistle, The Sharpshooter Blues, and Lightning Song--dealt with coming-of-age angst, Nordan’s real life story continued into an adulthood troubled by alcoholism, infidelity, divorce, and death. Boy with Loaded Gun is dedicated to one son and in memory of a son who died in infancy, a son who committed suicide as a young adult, Nordan’s biological father, and his stepfather.

Normally the Delta memoirist would be composing his next novel, but this book “requires a longer fallow period. I have had to creep back to an invisible cave to resuscitate myself for my next writing,” said Nordan.

Conference-goers were curious about truth and lies in Nordan’s fictionalized memoir. He detailed his tall, slender grandfather as a “short, warty man” without knowing why. The car shown on the book jacket belonged to his stepfather, but the only part of the startled-boy photo that was Nordan is the elephantine ear.

Nordan explained that, in an autobiography, the narrator and main character are the same voice. He said, “You are the person you are as you speak and the person you were earlier as you perform. Because children have less capacity for language and reflection, the story is an adult remembering; the writing must capture the rhythm of the child as well as reveal the adult that the child becomes.”

Nordan recalled, “When I left home I was angry at Mississippi and Itta Bena for the racial violence and slurs. I was in a box and I wanted out. I believe I tempered my writing with love for the people who nurtured me to become who I now am.”

Reviewers frequently compare Nordan’s writing to the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Nordan, who teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, contends he imitates the clarity of George Orwell’s nonfiction and Mark Twain’s travel books, especially Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It. When Twain described seeing his first jack rabbit, in that moment of exaggeration Nordan grasped all of the possibility of humor and hyperbole that could produce the truest, most honest memoir. “I have closure in my story by leaving myself in a place of love and health. I moved beyond the terrible grief I had suffered to a place of joy, even though it was kind of a wacky joy,” Nordan said, grinning.

Holland, during her early years in Greenwood, was a rape victim, was expelled from school, was a prostitute, and was arrested for assault and shoplifting. Then she became involved with the civil rights movement in 1962. Her autobiography recounts her early experiences and tells how her mother was burned and later died after a firebomb attack on their home in1965. The attack was believed to be retribution for Holland’s civil rights activism, and Holland left Greenwood five months later.

When she returned to Greenwood as a successful playwright with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, the mayor declared October 19, 1991, as Dr. Endesha Ida Mae “Cat” Holland Day. Along the way to getting her doctorate, Holland enrolled in an undergraduate drama class that turned out to be for advanced playwrights. Holland’s first two assignments about her mother’s life and midwifery left the class and teacher in tears. “It was a smooth transition from the oral tradition of telling stories and 'play acting' to writing my autobiography,” recalled Holland.

Now living in Venice, California, and teaching at the University of Southern California’s School of Theater and its Gender Studies Program, she was accompanied to Oxford by a filmmaker who is documenting her life. “Ole Miss used to be a gleam in somebody’s eyes,” remembered Holland. “We couldn’t come. I’ve been asked,‘Miss Cat, how did you make it?’ ‘With the help of my people,’ I answered.”

Unfortunately, Holland and a brother have inherited the same debilitating nerve disease called ataxia that affected their mother. Holland remembered the day her own fingers refused to hold a pen and her communications returned to the oral tradition. Today, mobility is dependent upon a wheelchair, and her conference reading was performed by a former Southern Studies student at Ole Miss.

Smiling generously, the professor continues to live up to her added name of “Endesha.” The Swahili word means “driver--she who drives herself and others forward.”

Holland and other panelists talked about the memoir as the novel of the new decade, and Nordan believes American’s fascination with gossip is why. “How badly we acted, what messes we made, and how we came out at the end have propelled us into being literary Jerry Springers,” said Nordan.

Tate Cooper Conlon