Inside the home of SIBA's famous "Lady Banks" aka Nicki Leone

Lady Banks' Commonplace Book is a blog for people interested in Southern literature, sponsored by booksellers who are members of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) and featuring the latest literary news and events around the South from Her Ladyship, the Editor.

SIBA was a little unusual in that it was one of the first book trade organizations to start reaching out to the customers of their bookstore members. They wanted Southern readers to buy their books at Southern bookshops. So they came up with the idea of doing a newsletter featuring books that their booksellers were reading and talking about. Nicki was on the phone with Wanda Jewell (the Executive Director) and it happened to be early spring in Wilmington NC (where Nicki lives) and there were Lady Banks roses blooming everywhere. Nicki said, “How about calling it Lady Banks?” Nicki's Lady Banks became a southern woman of a certain age who dispensed opinions on literary topics in a vaguely Austenian manner in her “commonplace book” of interesting literary tidbits. 

The home of "Lady Banks": 

                                                                       Outside

Inside

My library table.

The Library.

The library, and my grandmother's yellow reading chair.

Living room bookshelves: travel literature and Polo.

Mementos: a dish of job's tears from the garden, a possum piggy bank made by friends who are potters (in Tryon), under the glass of the lamp are some long leaf pinecones my mother and I found on a hike, and various feathers I've found during walks.

 All the pottery comes from Little Mountain pottery near Tryon. Every October I used to go up with friends to their kiln opening, and spend the weekend camping and listening to people play fiddle music.  The framed bird prints and the tiles come from my grandfather. I think the tile is a memento from a trip to India when my aunt was married there. Most of the bric-a-brac on the bookshelves comes from family or friends and are reminders of people and places.

 The family Audubon print, under my guardianship at the moment. "American Bitterns".

Sinead, one of the many cats that have come through my life. Portrait by me. 😊

The print is from a local artist and children's book writer Virginia Wright-Frierson. She created a bottle house in Arlie Gardens in honor of Minnie Evans, and this dove made its home there. The photo in the front is my mother when she was in her thirties, I think. The one behind is me, my sister, and three of my cousins.

My grandmother.

Some of my favorite children's books, rather battered copies from being re-read so often. Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book is on top. Also, Harry Potter!  The photo is from a family reunion. We are rarely all of us in one place at the same time.

Past Southern Book Prize finalists. And Tyra on top. 

Poetry to the left, essays and "belle lettres" to the right. I think about half the right bookcase is "books about books."

Close-up of my possum piggy bank. Isn't it cool? (It's also completely full!)

Classical lit and a southwestern bowl from my grandparents. The family calls it "the Maria bowl" because it's signed by a Native American potter named Maria Martinez who rediscovered traditional pueblo pottery techniques. The entire case is devoted to classical Greek and Roman literature, though. I went through a mad obsession with it after reading a book called "Poets in a Landscape" by Gilbert Highet. 

This is Tyger, my youngest and most deadly cat.

Lucy, who sleeps under the table on my feet when I'm working.

 Kitchen, the most often-used cookbooks. International to the left, favorite vegetarian and baking books in the case to the left of the door, and cookbooks I use so often I'm on my second or third copy to the right. All my favorite cookbooks are in the pink bookcases.

Different flours, since I like to bake bread. (Kneading dough is stress-relief!) It's been years since I've bought it in a supermarket.

                      Dried beans, field peas, and lentils. I think I could live on chickpeas and lentils!

Nicki, tell me about where you live.  

I live just north of Wilmington, North Carolina, on the Intracoastal Waterway. I can actually see across the sound and the southern tip of Topsail Beach to the ocean.

That in itself tells you why I love it so much! It is stunningly beautiful. I grew up in western New York, and spent my college years in Boston, so coming south was a real change for me.  I love how easy it is to be out of doors in the south. Even in the summer, when triple digit temperatures drive you indoors, you can still be out in the early morning and early evening. And in the winter, well – January in Boston tends to be 32F and raining. It’s a misery. January where I am now is cool and sunny and perfect walking weather. Really, if I didn’t have to work, I’d only ever go inside to sleep. 

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

I grew up in in Buffalo, New York, in the Parkside neighborhood. It was ridiculously idyllic – when I tell friends about it they roll their eyes. The street, Summit Ave., was on a hill (good for roller-skating and skateboarding) but not a major through-street, so kids could play street hockey without fear. The houses were all slightly run-down Victorian piles filled with families that had lots of kids. There were lots of Irish and Italian families so five, six, even eight kids wasn’t unusual. We could field both sides of a baseball team without a problem.

Nicki, David and Gabriella Leone

The street had a block party every year and there were enough kids to have a parade.  And we all really raked it in on Halloween! We were also within walking distance of a candy store, the school, the local branch library, a park, and the zoo. And, although we didn’t really appreciate it at the time, of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin house.  Really, I don’t know why I ever decided to move away! Mostly though, what I remember from growing up there was playing with all the other kids, and how everyone on the block seemed to know everyone else. It was like its own little village.

Did you have a favorite teacher and are you still in touch with him or her?

"Nicole's" High School Year Book Page

Yes, two from my high school, City Honors School at Fosdick-Masten Park, in Buffalo NY, –

neither of whom I’m still in touch with, so they probably have no idea how much of an impact they had on me. One was Ms. Nancy Tepas, who taught math. In an era when my public school education was going through one of its “progressive” phases – with lots of emphasis promoting creativity and self-expression (at least, that’s how I remember it), Ms. Tepas was notably strict. She made us sit in desks alphabetically by our names, instead of letting us sit near our friends! And her tests were really hard – I think she was the first teacher my class ever had that wouldn’t let us get away with anything.  But she had this knack for making you want to do the best you could, and when you finally mastered something that was giving you trouble, she noticed. You felt you’d made her proud. If you did get a good grade on one of those tests you felt like you’d really done something.  Beyond any math, Ms. Tepas taught us how fun and gratifying it is to face a challenge and overcome it.
 

The other teacher was Ms. Diana Rochford, who taught English Composition. I credit her with my ability to write a decent sentence, because up until that point, all my English teachers had been doing things like telling us to keep journals and write haiku. I couldn’t diagram a sentence to save my life. Ms. Rochford, who was about four and a half feet tall, with long gray hair that she wore loose, and a sweet disposition, ruled the class with an iron, uh, ruler, and a ruthless red pen.  “What about poetic license?” I remember someone in the class asking, fresh out of a semester reading e. e. cummings.  “There is no place in this class for poetic license,” she said implacably. And yet, as essay after essay was returned, with fewer and fewer red-marked corrections each time, it was impossible not to feel, like I did with Ms. Tepas, that I really was getting somewhere. Ms. Rochford’s standards were high, but that just made you feel extra proud when you managed to reach them. I’m positive that all of us who ended up taking AP English did so well because of Ms. Rochford drumming into us the rules of getting your point across in a sentence, rather than because of all the journal-writing. And like Ms. Tepas, she had that talent for making kids want to try harder. “Keep trying” is probably the best lesson I learned from both. 

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?

Oh goodness yes, more than one. More than a dozen, maybe. I am a person who lets herself be changed by books; I think I’ve always been that kind of person. I grew up trusting books and guided by books.

I was little Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, methodically reading her way through all the books in her local library—that is exactly the kind of thing I would do. So I seem to be open to being changed by books. I like it when a book upsets my apple cart and makes me question everything.

As for “epiphany” literary moments, though, the first that comes to mind is the first time I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In 1976 my dad had a sabbatical at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg so the whole family moved down there for about 18 months.  Annie Dillard’s book had just come out a year or two before, and since it was set in that part of the country, my mom was reading it. Therefore, I read it, because I liked to read whatever books my mom was. Mom had a policy about books and her kids – she never ever took a book out of our hands, but she was diligent in putting the books she liked into them.

I was too young to really absorb most of Dillard’s philosophical ramblings, but the pictures she painted in that book have stayed with me forever. The Osage Orange tree filled with starlings. The frog attacked by a water bug which deflates in front of her like a leaking balloon. The tom cat that leapt through her window at night after hunting, leaving bloody paw prints all over her bedspread.  It was Annie Dillard that first brought home to me how much LIFE there was, all around us, all the time, just thrumming under our feet and our fingers.

The other book that made a huge impression on me was Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Once again, a book that was probably too old for me – I think I was around twelve when I took one of the four volumes down off my parents’ bookshelf.  I’m sure anyone who has read them is thinking about all the sex, violence and general depravity in them. But I didn’t notice all that so much. I was a kid, and kids are supremely self-centered and tend to only pay attention to the things that really interest them. So little twelve-year-old me wasn’t really interested in the tangled love affairs that work themselves out through the four books. I was captivated by the city of Alexandria, through Durrell’s vivid descriptions of the landscape, the crowded streets and dusty courtyards, the mysterious doors that led to holy shrines, or seedy clubs, or brothels, or the stalls of fortune tellers. It was a beautiful, overwritten, indulgent love song to a place that I never got out of my head. Years later, when I went to college, I minored in Middle Eastern Studies. The seed of that interest what planted by Durrell.

Durrell is also the reason I first began to think that “writing” was something to aspire to. When I first picked them up, I accidentally started out of order – I read Balthazar first, instead of Justine, the way Durrell intended. If you’ve read the Quartet, you know that Justine is the narrator’s account of a love affair he has with a married woman who has a dangerous and jealous husband.  In Balthazar, the narrator has sent his account to a friend, who returns it with hundreds of annotations, giving his own perspective of all the events described, an alternate opinion of both the woman and her husband, and adding a whole layer of other knowledge, interpretation, and meaning.  So starting with that book was like reading a story with double vision – where two people are telling you what happened, but they don’t always line up. Stories are interrupted by running commentary, scenes are turned a little to the side, hitherto unseen motivations added, and just when you think you have a picture in your mind, it is turned upside down.  Durrell called it retelling a story by “moving two steps to the left” or something to that effect. 

The thing is, I didn’t know you could tell stories like that – braided and piecemeal, like hopping from steppingstone to steppingstone in a river instead of walking straight down the path of a plot. Without being able to put it into words, I just knew I was fascinated by the intricacy of it. I finished the book and immediately re-read it just for the experience of reading it, if you know what I mean. 

Objectively, I know Lawrence Durrell’s writing tends towards the overblown and even pretentious. His Alexandria Quartet is an ambitious undertaking that is not always equal to the task. But more than any other writer, Durrell is the person who made me aware of the possibilities of literature. 

Do you have a favorite children’s book?

Once again, many, many, many! Are you kidding? It’s the books we read as children that settle into us the most deeply and stay with us the longest. I actually have spent a fair amount of effort recreating the bookshelf of my favorite childhood books– tracking down not just the book, but the same edition of the book with the same illustrations: Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates illustrated by Dennis A. Dierks, a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, illustrated by Arthur Szyk . A Child’s Garden of Verses illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa An early edition of Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book. A Japanese folktale called The Crane Maiden, retold by Miyoko Matsutani. Holling Clancy Hollings’ Paddle-to-the-Sea. A funny story of how two Bantam hens become friends called Flossie and Bossie by the actress/director Eva Le Gallienne of all people, and illustrated by Garth Williams, that I think no one has ever heard of but me.

                                

But probably my very favorite children’s books are the Moomin stories by Tove Jansson. My mom found them in a little children’s book shop that I think was right next to our favorite toy store – the kind that had lots of old fashioned meticulously reproduced furniture for doll houses,  historically accurate tin army soldiers for various armies of different countries and different time periods, and train sets like you would not believe. 

                                            

Moomins have become more famous now, but at the time I don’t think anyone but my brother, sister, and I had ever even heard of them. It’s a series of stories about little creatures who live in Finland and have adventures that are told in a beautiful and melancholy way. In Moominsummer Madness, the first I remember reading but the last Jansson wrote, the Moomin family is ousted from their house by a flood and take refuge on a theater that happens to float by (as will sometimes happen). They’ve never seen a theater, and think it is a house that is missing a wall and all its people—who must have been very strange people indeed, if the clothes in the costume room are anything to go by. They pick up more refugees from the flood, and eventually the theater runs aground in a bay. Moominpappa, learning what a play is, decides to write one – he is of a literary bent and has been writing his memoirs for years -- the whole family can act in. Creatures row out in little boats to watch the performance. In that strangely surreal yet wise way of children’s literature, where mad things make sense, its really a story about what it is that makes a place a home.

The Moomin books –there are about six or seven of them, I think, along with a couple of picture books—were so beloved by our family that to this day we still talk about them.  My brother named his blog, Snufkin’s Rucksack, after a Moomin character who likes to wander and regards. And for years, whenever I saw the books in a bookshop I would buy them, my weak but sincere vote for keeping them in print for other children to discover. I have two sets of the books.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?

I’m sure there must be hundreds. There’s the story about how when I had to write one of those “what do you want to be when you grow up” essays in third grade, maybe? I wrote that I wanted to be “the lady who lived at the end of the street in a big house with lot of books and cats.” That story is absolutely true. There was an actual house at the end of our block was picturing when I wrote it. I don’t live there, but as far as childhood dreams go, that one has otherwise been a success. 

My younger brother and sister would probably tell you about the red-letter day when they realized they didn’t have to do everything I said just because I was older. We did used to play together as kids and I was an awful little dictator there for a while. I remember when I ran to tell our mom that there was a revolution going on in the ranks she was profoundly unimpressed and said, “I’m not surprised.”

How would you say you are different now than you were in your 20’s.

I hope I’m less judgmental, and maybe a little more empathetic. I know I’m more radical but less willing to live by the kind of bumper-sticker slogans I used to put all over my car. It’s harder to talk me out of opinions I’ve formed, but I also know I’m less quick to jump to conclusions. I’m also, I’m sorry to say, less confident about the future than I was in my 20s. In my 20s I was discovering radical feminism. Change seemed possible back then. The future was something to look forward to. In my 50s – against this backdrop of inexorable climate change, unfettered gun violence, rising waves of racism, fanaticism, xenophobia, bigotry, and rampant, casual sexual assault -- I feel a little like we’re all on the Titanic without the will to change course and get out of the way of the iceberg.   

How did you originally become involved with SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance)?

I used to manage Bristol Books in Wilmington, North Carolina, and like many booksellers I really depended on SIBA (or, “SEBA” as it was known back then) for help in making the business successful. And especially for the opportunity it provided for connecting with other booksellers who were facing the same challenges my store was facing. In fact, I was so desperate for those connections that I called Wanda Jewell one day and asked her if SIBA could create a listserv – something booksellers could use to contact other booksellers easily. “That’s a great idea,” she said, “will you run it?”  I think that was my first time working with SIBA. When Bristol Books closed several years later, I told Wanda I would be looking for work and she basically invented a job for me.

You have a passion for your garden, has this been a lifelong feeling?

Gardening was always my mother’s province – ever since I can remember she has had a garden. And in truth, when I was young “the garden” was just a backdrop to our backyard games. Mom showed us where the jack-in-the-pulpits grew, and she taught us the names of the different bulbs and peonies, and she identified the shrubs and the trees overhead. So I don’t think I ever questioned the assumption that you should know the names of the things that are growing around you.

But I didn’t really start gardening until about fifteen years ago, when I finally moved to a house with enough of a yard to start one. I’m a total dilettante. I try things, see if they will grow, fall behind on my weeding, and generally garden under a philosophy of benign neglect. But for all that, the garden is probably one of the most rewarding and peace-giving things I’ve ever done. I’ll probably never grow prize roses, or get bushels of tomatoes or squash (I have trouble with wildness without seeing something new: a dozen different pollinators on  patch of monarda. A coreopsis plant that came up with red flowers instead of yellow.  A patch of wild strawberry that has spread in an unexpected direction. A small hog-nosed snake sunning itself in the corn. I once found a butterfly in the process of coming out of its cocoon and got to see the whole process. It is a place full of hope and happy accidents and it teaches me patience and wonder. h squash). But I can never walk through its semi-wildness without seeing something new: a dozen different pollinators on  patch of monarda. A coreopsis plant that came up with red flowers instead of yellow.  A patch of wild strawberry that has spread in an unexpected direction. A small hog-nosed snake sunning itself in the corn. I once found a butterfly in the process of coming out of its cocoon and got to see the whole process. It is a place full of hope and happy accidents and it teaches me patience and wonder.

And in a short essay…………………………

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME

to any period from before recorded history to yesterday,

be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice,

actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.

When would you go?

London, 1601, and I’d bring my cellphone so I could take pictures of Shakespeare really writing Shakespeare so all those people who think he didn’t can give it a rest and go home. 

Okay, no, not really. Mostly not really. Maybe just a little bit. Despite my devotion to Dr. Who and my one great wish being a TARDIS, this is a hard question for me. Am I still female in this time travel mental exercise? Because if so, my ability to enjoy most “whens” is pretty circumscribed. 

I find myself drawn to time periods where some kind of sea-change is happening, and our understanding of the universe is opening. I’m fond of the Enlightenment era – that long century launched by Newton’s Principia only to be felled by the French Revolution and end up limping, bloody, into the early 19th century. When I think of “historical people I’d like to meet” many of them are from somewhere along this time. Visionary people who met with each other at dining clubs and discussed science and philosophy and wrote monographs of ideas that would end up changing the world right under their feet.

Where would you go?

London or Paris, except of course during the Reign of Terror.

Who would you want to meet?

And yet, the two people I would love to sit down and talk to were not to be found in either London or Paris, at least, not very often. They were “American” although that word didn’t mean then what it means today.   The first, at the very beginning of the era, would be Roger Williams – the Puritan minister who left his church and founded Rhode Island.

He was one of the earliest proponents of the separation of church and state, and his writings influenced Thomas Jefferson. He came over the to New World to be a part of Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” but eventually got kicked out of the colony of Massachusetts after charging the church authorities with corruption (he thought the Native Americans should be paid for their land, it didn’t go down well). He was a brilliant linguist and wrote the first and still highly accurate Narragansett-English dictionary. I think he epitomizes the best example of what it means to follow one’s conscience.

The other person I’d really like to meet is Margaret Fuller – full on at the end of the “Enlightenment” and into what we now call the “Romantic Era.”

She was a protégé of Emerson, the woman who wrote that marriage was slavery for women. She worked with women prisoners – mostly prostitutes – whom she regarded as victims of the fate of any woman without male protection in society that did not allow women self-determination. She was a journalist for the New York Tribune under Horace Greely who covered the European Spring revolution for the American press, knew Garibaldi and George Sand, and supposedly married an Italian revolutionary named Ossoli – although since she was a Protestant and he was a Roman Catholic, it isn’t clear that they were formally married. She spoke Latin as fluently as English and was known as the most well-read person, male or female, in New England. 

What I admire most about Williams and Fuller is their commitment to living a self-created and self-determined life amid a society that had no place for either. They had to basically invent themselves, in the face of a huge amount of opposition and even hostility and danger. I think the world I live in is a better place because they were in it first.

And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?

Ah, now that I do have an answer for. Because it was a time when one person could make a difference. A man could write one pamphlet, a woman could write one review in a newspaper, and the world might rock stagger in its orbit.

We don’t really live in a world like that anymore. Everyone has a voice, but we all drown each other out. Thanks Nicki, I love your home (you actually have more books than we do!) and your fascinating answers to my questions. We are all so lucky to have Lady Banks (and you) in our lives. See you at the Discovery Show!