After the storm: Lorian Hemingway's a world turned over. (Home Pages).

Lorian Hemingway has always been terrified by tornados. She suspects she inherited her fear from her grandmother who lived in Memphis. After spending much of childhood in Jackson's insulated Forest Hills subdivision, she moved to Nashville with her mother and stepfather carrying a box of dirt from her idyllic Mississippi home Months later, she learned to her horror that the around Candlestick Park, a strip mall near her so Jackson house, had been devastated by a deadly tornado, obliterating familiar haunts and killing injuring old friends. The memory has festered in mind like a nightmare demanding the release she finally found by writing her story of the Candlestick tornado March 3, 1966. The result is A World Turned Over nominated for the National Book Award.

The granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, Lorian spent her happiest childhood years in a house with a large picture window on Cherrywood Drive. It was an environment where neighbors were like family, and playmates were found by knocking on any door. Hemingway and her friends rode bicycles in the wake of the fog machine sent by the city to kill mosquitoes, and they tested themselves by walking gingerly on the eight-inch-wide pipe that spanned the rushing waters of Caney Creek, balancing like tightrope walkers with outstretched arms. Hemingway giggled away the night with her pre-teen girl friends at pajama parties, sharing confidences about their crushes on sun-bronzed high school boys.

When the sun turned brutal on August afternoons, they cooled off with a root beer float at the Dog 'n' Suds before exploring Liberty Grocery for candy bars or browsing at Southwest Drugs for magazines. These stores formed the nucleus of Candlestick Park, the shiny new shopping center built by Homer Lee Howie and named while he was watching the World Series.

In her book, Hemingway describes this period as the time when she recognized that Jackson was home: "...[I]t was here in this chlorophyll world where all was green but the dirt that I first heard the faint drumming of that beat separate from all others, and I knew home when I saw it. I knew home when I heard it. I knew home when I smelled it."

It was also here that Hemingway's writing ability took root and blossomed with a talent that led her to write Walking into The River, a novel, and Walk on Water, a memoir.

"I was just a little girl in Jackson when some poems of mine had been published and I had the good fortune of meeting Eudora Welty," she said in an interview.

Decades later, in 1996, her interest in Welty brought her to Jackson to speak at the Eudora Welty Film and Fiction Festival. Another speaker was Jeff Baker, then-associate editor of the Oxford American, who later became Hemingway's husband. Baker's uncle is Thomas Hal Phillips, the prolific author and screenwriter from Corinth.

On this occasion and others when she visited Jackson, Hemingway's thoughts turned to the Candlestick tornado that shattered her childhood memories.

"The tragedy has haunted me all my life, and each time I would return to Mississippi, people would talk about it, even thirty years later. I so wanted to write the story of these good people and of what they had endured and of the faith that had carried them so far."

And write their stories she did.

With compassion and some fear that the retelling would be too painful, she gently probed the scabs of old wounds by questioning many survivors of the killer storm. Sharing buried memories led to a catharsis that brought tears to the writer's eyes--as well as the subjects'.

Many memories are similar. Most remember the red-haired boy who ran down the street screaming "Tornado's coming." Several mention the surreal yellow sky that turned black.

Mary Hudgins, who owned the Dog 'n' Suds with her husband Fred, called it "so dark, so eerie, so very, very, dark." More deaths occurred at the restaurant than any other location.

Then the memories became personal. Donna Durr, Hemingway's seventh-grade science teacher, will never forget clutching her baby while her Volkswagen was lifted seventy-five feet above the scene of destruction, then gently lowered to the ground, leaving both passengers unharmed.

Larry Swales, a Rankin County Supervisor, remembers his friend, Ronnie Clark, who bagged groceries with him at Liberty, holding onto a door handle with both hands while the wind battered him up and down, then slammed the door so forcefully that the plate glass shattered.

Karei McDonald, a firefighter who was among the first on the scene, said that "it was like war," with every injury imaginable. He gathered the wounded who lay like rag dolls over the parking lot where wind had destroyed every car.

Perhaps most poignant was Hemingway's interview with the family of Ronny Hannis, a hero of the tragedy mentioned by every survivor. Hannis was miraculously empowered with supernatural strength to save many people while unknowingly suffering from internal injuries that eventually proved fatal. Doctors later reported that he had been in shock throughout the ordeal.

Repeatedly, the survivors impressed Hemingway with their faith and belief that God was with them throughout the experience.

Recently, on her way home to Seattle after awarding prizes at the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition at Hemingway Days in Key West, the author appeared at a book signing at Lemuria Bookstore. The line was long and the store sold out of A World Turned Over before it ended. Afterward, many survivors of the Candlestick tornado gathered with Hemingway fans at the Musiquarim above Lemuria for a reading.

After she finished, Hemingway asked if anyone had questions or wanted to make comments. The only reply was from one of her former neighbors.

"We love you," she said, and the applause was like thunder.

"I love you, too," said Lorian Hemingway. And everyone knew she meant it.