Cerebral Weather: A Review
Author Mary Buchannon Sellers, Mississippi's child
Everyone who knows anything about writing will tell you that the money is in screenplays and novels. In Mississippi, though, the heart of the thing is the story. They are the reverberations from dinner tables, summer porches, church lobbies, bar tops, and cemeteries where we have discussions about ourselves.
I took “The Story” from Suzanne Marrs. A lot of students were intimidated to take anything at all from Suzanne. Even though she was perfectly lovely, she had this enormous reputation and earned respect from all the secret societies of Southern letters. Taking “The Story” from her seemed like an audience with the Great and Powerful Oz.
I had a secret that the other students didn’t know about. My father’s best friend was in love with Suzanne. In the days that followed my father’s early death, I would have done anything for Rowan. Actually anything. In this May-September romance, he suffered from a lifelong difficulty expressing anything about how he felt, but she had an ability to see those things that weren’t expressly said. It worked out.
Despite what you’ve heard about Caddy’s soiled bloomers or that boy that jumped off a bridge, the greatest romance that ever came out of Mississippi was probably Suzanne and Rowan driving Eudora Welty and Charlotte Capers around Mississippi in their last years. It turned out those were also Rowan’s last. I don’t know how Suzanne weathered that.
In class, Suzanne asked, “Other than length, what’s the difference between the story and the novel? There are no wrong answers.” Whenever a teacher says, “There are no wrong answers,” they’re lying.
“Stories seek to pull something very short into something long, or they seek to compress something very long into something short.” And then I used “Powerhouse” and “A Rose For Emily” to make my point. “Powerhouse” makes a lengthy moment-by-moment examination of a band taking a break, where “A Rose For Emily” compresses the entire history of a town into the few moments where some men break into an old house. Sometimes you can combine the two, like in “By the Waters of Babylon.”
Very young, Mary Buchanan Sellers is proving herself a master of the story. Her book, “Cerebral Weather,” collects her stories about mental health.
While the Mary part is innocuous, the Buchannan and the Sellers, the McIntyre and the Wilson parts of her incorporate her into the very fabric of Mississippi. She’s the great-grandchild of Brandon, Mississippi, where they are discussing taking down one of Mississippi’s last Confederate monuments, not because it’s causing racial strife, but because it sits in the middle of a busy exchange in the middle of town and people keep bumping its pedistal with their cars, threatening to topple it. Someone suggested finding an old graveyard for it. That might be fitting.
A graduate of the University of Mississippi, which is the second-best degree in Mississippi, she is the recipient of a three-generation-old debt I owe the women of her family. When I was eight, her grandmother discovered why I wasn’t able to read at the proper level for my age and plotted a plan to resolve it. When I was thirteen, her mother said I would either learn to dance at parties, or she wouldn’t leave me alone about it. These sorts of things create a special sort of indebtedness in a gentleman.
I was introduced to her by Facebook, which kept recommending her as a friend. I didn’t recognize her name at all, but then one day I realized I recognized the shape of her face. The last photograph I’d seen of her was as an infant on her mother’s hip. I soon realized that I knew a great deal about this child. Ironically, she was coming out as a writer at the same time that I was.
My story as a writer is deeply involved in the mental health issues explored in “Cerebral Weather,” and my ability to write at all was the product of her grandmother’s skill as a teacher. Her mother calls her MB, although when I first opened Cerebral Weather, I hadn't seen her mother in almost forty years.
Sellers is writing about the experience of living in a family with close, extended, and intense mental health issues. It's all very familiar to me. The feelings of isolation, abandonment, and embarrassment create a sort of PTSD that never entirely clears up.
She writes from the perspective of a loved one, dependent, child, secondary, and tertiary victim to something unexplainable, unimaginable. She seeks answers that yield layers and layers of new questions.
Words are kind to her, and she is kind to them. She writes with a deftness and a naturalness that reminds me of her mother.
There's no set limit to the size of the story, and Sellers takes great advantage of that. Some of her stories are a hundred words, some are a thousand, some are three. She spins tales like a jazz pianist developing a theme. In Facebook Messenger, we discuss the shoptalk of writers, productivity measured by word counts. My concepts of it will forever be set by Ray Bradbury, who was often paid by the word. A thousand words in a day, and you can call yourself a writer. Sellers doesn't share these restrictions.
She's a very literary writer, meaning she studied to do this. For generations, Ole Miss had a very good English Department. Barry Hannah made it into a very good writing school. Some of Sellers’ teachers are people I know. Some have a pretty remarkable reputation.
Some of her stories made me cry. There’s a haunting similarity between her experiences and mine. There's also the issue that she writes about pain that came to people I have loved since before she was born. She dedicates the book to her grandfather and includes a photograph of him as a very young man. A photograph I've never seen, but it is very familiar. I can see his face in hers.
If this all sounds very personal to me, it is, but don't let that put you off the book. These are letters about the life MB had growing up that I missed. She's writing about a very common experience, if not a universal one. It's a confession. A plea for understanding. The story writers tell at bars in uneven lighting when they want to tell more than just the truth.
She's a real master of metaphor, so clouds, trees, birds, stains on skirts, all have layers of meaning. All the words have layers of meaning. She drags a stick slowly through a still pond to upset the layers of silt, but not make waves.
Cerebral Weather is available on Amazon, and hopefully soon at Lemuria and Square Books. (That's a hint, guys.) When Sellers isn't writing, she works for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in a job remarkably similar to the one Charlotte Capers had at the same age. (That's also a hint.)
