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Table Scraps and Other Essays
Foreword by Randy Bates
Imprint: Resource Publications
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.
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).
“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
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