The People Say Project, following on the success of their New Orleans mayoral series last year, are running a series of events on Fridays featuring candidates for the District B council seat. Starting at 6pm at Handsome Willy’s bar with free food, more information is available here. This Friday’s event features Marlon “10th Ward Buck” Horton.

I’m delighted to say that good friend Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings, an account of some of the most extraordinary creatures in nature, is finally being published this week by Granta Books. Having known and adored the book since it was in manuscript form, and having heard Caspar present the finished version this summer at the Wilderness Festival, I can honestly say it is one of the most beautiful and necessary books on natural history to be published in recent years. Warm, lucid, scholarly, yet overflowing with mystery and wonder: it cannot be savored long or often enough. An early review from Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman is available here: congratulations to Caspar and to everyone who had a hand in this wonderful work.

Pelican Bomb has just put up a brief review of the work of Myrtle von Damitz, a painter based in New Orleans, and one of the Oxford American’s recent flag-bearers for new Southern art. For those in the area, her work will be on display in the Volatilia exhibition at Barrister’s Gallery on St Claude, opening November 10th.

Anna Clark has a searing article in the Guardian about the state of climate change coverage in the American media, an article that, had our protocols of the past decade been taken seriously by those who signed them, never would have had to be written. Nevertheless, she lays out clearly and succinctly the issues on the table, issues for those who work in media — and those who read it — alike. With COP18 in Qatar only two months away, it’s well worth a read.

In other news, if one conference on the state of media and journalism in New Orleans this past weekend wasn’t enough — recap of Rising Tide 7 available here — this coming weekend sees another on the same. The Oxford American is hosting a symposium this coming Friday at the Historic New Orleans Collection, to accompany their New South Journalism issue, just now on newsstands. More details here.

Moments like this are truly few and far between: it’s an incredible honor to have joined, as of this month, the Mississippi Artist Roster, a roll of working artists in the state  — musicians, artists, writers, and performers — sponsored and maintained by the Mississippi Arts Commission. To spend any time alongside such talented people as Philip Levin, Bill Ellison and Temperance Babcock, and the great Jimbo Mathus is humbling indeed, and only inspires me to work that much harder to justify the honor.

As part of this ongoing work, I’ll be doing more teaching and events in Mississippi in months to come; further information is available on my Teaching page.