Reception, Book Signing Is Friday For Creekmore Republication
By Dr. Jaime Harker
On Friday, March 24 author Hubert Creekmore will be celebrated in Water Valley with a reception and book signing at 5:30 p.m. at Violet Valley Bookstore. The celebration is in honor of the Water Valley writer and this year’s republication of his 1948 novel, “The Welcome.” Dr. Pip Gordon, a University of Mississippi Ph.D. and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville who wrote the introduction to the new edition will be signing books and Chef Dixie’s famous punch will also make an appearance.
At 6:30 p.m., Bozarts Gallery will feature an art opening and reception inspired by the theme of “The Welcome,” as well as a brief program including a presentation by Dr. Gordon, short readings from the novel, and the film “Dear Hubert Creekmore” by Mary Knight. Members of the Bozarts art collective respond in visual ways and in a variety of media to “The Welcome.” The opening reception, sponsored by the Oxford Conference for the Book, is free and open to the public.
Hubert Creekmore was born in Water Valley in 1907, attended the University of Mississippi, and moved with his family to Jackson, where he became friends with Eudora Welty, whose brother married Creekmore’s sister. He eventually moved to New York City to further his writing career and become ensconced within prestigious literary networks, most notably as an editor for New Directions, which published fellow Mississippian Tennessee Williams and the lion’s share of prestigious literature in the Cold War era. It was a remarkable ascent for a man from rural Mississippi.
Creekmore was many things: an editor, a translator, a poet, a novelist, even a gardener, whose book “Daffodils are Dangerous” remains one of my favorite gardening titles. As a novelist, he continued to be haunted by his Mississippi past. His three novels – “The Fingers of the Night” (1946), “The Welcome” (1948), and “The Chain in the Heart” (1953) – explore ongoing issues of religious fundamentalism, homophobia, and racism in his home state. Of the three, “The Welcome” may be the most personal. Published when he was 41 years old, the novel imagines Creekmore’s life if he had stayed in Mississippi and exposed the small-minded surveillance that defined the lives of everyone in small-town Ashton, most especially the closeted gay men who had to survive there.
When Creekmore published “The Welcome,” there was a publishing trend in New York featuring the gay “problem novel.” That group of novels included famous books, like Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” Gore Vidal’s
“The City and the Pillar,” and dozens of other novels that featured gay men from across the United States. Most of these fell out of print and have been forgotten, and Creekmore’s “The Welcome” was one of them.
All this changed last month, when the University Press of Mississippi reprinted “The Welcome,” with a beautiful cover painted by Water Valley artist Jonathan Kent Adams. It is going to be a grand night as Water Valley honors and celebrates its native son.
