Mary Manhein is best known for founding LSU’s Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Lab, which is famous for its forensic facial reconstructions that help identify human remains. Since retiring from LSU 10 years ago, Manhein has authored several nonfiction books about her career in forensic anthropology, co-authored a book about Louisian’s endangered cemeteries and written several whodunits, including a mystery series for young readers.
Manhein’s many years as a forensic scientist connected her with deep loss, a subject that shapes her writing but doesn’t define it. Her ultimate concern is resilience, our power to answer a broken world with tenderness and ingenuity.
That theme rests at the heart of “A Call to Rowan,” Manhein’s new novella that follows 13-year-old Marley Bledsoe as she navigates life in Rowan, a fictional north h town adjusting to change after the Korean War. Manhein will discuss her novella at 3 p.m. Sept. 28, at the Baton Rouge Main Library, 7711 Goodwood Blvd. The program is free and open to the public, and copies of “A Call to Rowan” and Manhein’s other books will be available for sale. The novella is now on Kindle, and it should be available soon at local bookstores.
She opens up her new work of fiction, a quick read at 120 pages, with this: “Being 13 years old truly was unlucky, Marley Bledsoe decided, as she felt the sand and gravel working their way up the thin soles of her worn, white sandals and into the small spaces between her toes. If she were a few years younger, she would be home right now, a few years older, and she would be gone.”
Manhein, who spent much of her childhood in small-town north h, knows this world well. She’s keen to the duality of life in a tiny community, how it can be both a consolation and a cage.
As Manhein walks us through Rowan, with stops at its grocery store and boarding house, its post office and library, we take pleasure in a landscape small enough to see at a glance. It's a farm community ordered by seasons, where “thick, waist-high cotton contained small green bowls waiting to burst forth into thick, white bundles to be picked in the fall.”
But the smallness of Rowan proves confining for Marley, a sharecropper’s daughter with an abusive father. Other dark souls shadow Manhein’s story. Rowan, like Harper Lee’s Maycomb, is a place where social intimacy brings everyone close, including those we’d rather escape.
Escape, primarily through books, is another one of the novella’s themes. There’s a subplot in which two of the locals read their way to a new life together, and Marley, who finds refuge in comic books and drugstore magazines, finds herself liberated by language, too.
In placing us within a now-vanished time and place, Manhein has returned to her vocation — revealing the faces of the forgotten, and making us see them once again as ours.
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.
