"The Myriad Journey"
Faulkner Fringe Festival Celebrates Its Third Birthday

Inspired by Edinburgh’s Fringe Theatre Festival and Alaska’s Last Frontier Theatre Festival’s fringe program, the University of Mississippi’s Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference’s own Faulkner Fringe Festival is dedicated to giving a voice to all who wish to speak about William Faulkner and his world. This year, seven volunteers spoke for up to 10 minutes at Southside Gallery on Monday night, July 22, beginning at 10:00 p.m. Milly Moorhead’s gallery, which like Square Books has become an artistic center of the Oxford community, was crowded with over 80 guests who had come for a late evening, wine-and-cheese happening. After a full day of scholarly papers, they were anticipating something short, light, and entertaining. They were not disappointed.

First, Marianne Steinsvik presented herself as “a Faulkner fan all the way from Spain”; and, as founding mother of the Faulkner Fringe Festival, she stressed that Faulkner fans are legion. “We DO exist outside of the campus,” she said, “and behind every fan there is an untold story.” Steinsvik encouraged everyone to tell others how they became Faulkner fans, asking, “Why Faulkner? Why do we choose him? Is there a common denominator?” She then told her own story of how as a child she was saved by books. At the age of 14, she found that books “opened the magic door to a new and up until now forbidden world.” Through the humanistic education she received at school and her own life experience, Marianne was prepared for Faulkner when she met him “long after her first youth was gone and when life had taken a more serious turn.”

Next, in a comic personal essay titled “The Myriad Journey,” Beverly Carothers explained what the Faulkner Journey has meant to her family. Married to Faulkner scholar Jim Carothers, Beverly has had little choice but book passage, board the ship of Faulkner enthusiasts, secure a seat up front, and enjoy the adventure. She remembers with delight the day she told her mother that Jim wanted to go to Charlottesville to work on Faulkner. Her mother said, “Well, he’s dead, isn’t he? Why would Jim want to study somebody who’s kicked the bucket?”

Some years later, Beverly’s daughter Cathleen began her own Faulkner journey when she was quite young. “One late September morning at the breakfast table,” Beverly explains, Cathleen “told us it was her day to share something for Show and Tell at kindergarten and Jim said, ‘Tell them it’s William Faulkner’s birthday.’” While traveling to school with her mother, Cathleen said, “Now, Mama, I know Mr. Faulkner was from Missippy, and I know he was a writer, but did he win that Nobel Prize, or did Daddy win it?”

Beverly concluded by thanking Jim for sharing his love of Faulkner with us as his words and stories have become the old eternal verities of our hearts as well. She explained: “To live through and write of so much pain and tragedy as Faulkner did, and to come out at the end with a sense of joy and celebration—this as as much as any of us can hope for.”

Months away from his 90th birthday, still practicing physician Dr. Ralph Friedman, who grew up in Oxford, spoke eloquently of his sporadic meetings with Mr. Faulkner. In dynamic, dramatic performances, Kassandra McLean and Scott Siekierski, both of the University of Texas at Dallas, presented poems they had written in honor of William Faulkner. Kassandra’s poem was titled “A Response to Mr. W. C. Faulkner”; Scott’s, “A Faulkner Alphabet.” Mary Barres Riggs followed with an imaginative poem focused on “Marie’s Lascivious Dreaming Knees: A Personal Response to William Faulkner’s ‘L’Après-Midi d’un Faune.’”

Milly Moorhead closed with a memory story, “1962”—the year her mother decided to move her family to Oxford in order to “better herself,” the year that was to change Milly’s life forever. In 1962, the streets of Oxford were lined with tanks and men in uniform. “It was war.” Milly and her friends traded homemade soup and cornbread for “zillions of cans of c-rations.” They pretended they were in the army and “hiked back of Dorothy Lee Tatum’s house and sat almost in poison ivy and ate like we were being bombed.” Within that memorable week, two men died, and James Meredith started school at Ole Miss.

Earlier that year, Martin J. Dain had flown down to Oxford from New England to make photographs of William Faulkner and the county he wrote about. Millie explained, “Also going on at this time in the Caribbean was the Bay of Pigs, when all the Cuban exiles had aligned themselves with the U.S. government for the invasion of Cuba.” And in 1962, William Faulkner died. Milly continued: “I don’t exactly blame Faulkner for leaving the world when he did, but I find it interesting that things went crazy after he died.” Sorry to have missed meeting Faulkner by months, Milly credits him for getting us to write something, to think something, to remember a particular time in our lives. For her this time, it is 1962.

Colby H. Kullman

Above: Dr. Ralph Friedman, standing right, tells the Faulkner Fringe Festival audience at Southside Gallery about his occasional meetings with William Faulkner in their hometown of Oxford. Photo by Milly Moorhead.