JACKSON, Miss. – This year’s Mississippi Book Festival, held annually on the grounds of the state Capitol, included a “Remembering Willie Morris” panel celebrating the life of the lauded Mississippi author who passed away in 1999. The discussion featured authors Jack Bales and Sid Salter, both Morris contemporaries, along with Yoknapatawpha Press publisher Lawrence “Larry” Wells and David Rae Morris, Willie’s son.
The younger Morris recently published, “Love, Daddy: Letters From My Father,” which chronicles their shared past and examines the complex nature of father-and-son relationships through an assortment of photographs and personal letters between the two.
In the video clip below, Wells reflects on Willie Morris’s Oxford, Miss., era and the tremendous impact he had on the sleepy little North Mississippi college town during the ten years (1980-90) when he served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi.