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Jan Risher
On Navajo land, this Louisiana woman learned the work of a shepherd Readers have not let me forget about Kristyn Carver. Since my column about her plan to spend a week helping tend sheep with a family on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, people have stopped me at grocery stores, called the office and emailed. How did it go? Some wanted an update before she had even made it home to Mandeville. She is home now, as is her lifelong friend Jennifer Nottingham, who flew in from Alaska to join her. The short answer? Carver went to Arizona to help move sheep. She never moved a single one. But that’s not what she came home talking about. It turns out the story belongs as much to a 27-year-old named Timothy Benally as it does to Carver. Benally helped arrange Carver’s trip. She teaches at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and has spent years wanting to better understand the Bible’s many shepherd metaphors. The morning she flew out, driving across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in a downpour, she prayed she’d be present to whoever crossed her path that day. Every seatmate she met and every stranger she encountered asked where she was headed. Then they wanted to know why. The plan was straightforward. She would help Benally’s uncle, Vince Benally, move the family’s sheep from their winter camp to higher summer grazing land. Nature had other ideas.
ä See SHEPHERD, page 2G
Kathryn Stockett’s longawaited second novel, ‘The Calamity Club,’ is set in Oxford, Mississippi. PROVIDED PHOTO | STAFF ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER MARTIN
After soaring to literary fame with her 2009 debut ‘The Help,’ Kathryn Stockett took 17 years to write her follow-up. The place where she grew up helped keep the words flowing. BY JAN RISHER Staff writer
PROVIDED PHOTO
Jennifer Nottingham, of Alaska, from left, met her childhood friend Kristyn Carver in Arizona for a week of assisting Tim Benally and his family tend their sheep on the land where his family has lived for generations, part of the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
Shyla Clark, from left, Sarah Edgecomb, Lauren Cole and Davis Cole stand in front of a diverse selection of threads and canvases at The Red Stitch’s current location in Baton Rouge. PROVIDED PHOTO
Editor’s note: Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 debut novel, “The Help,” sold more than 15 million copies, spent more than 100 weeks atop The New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. Her second novel, “The Calamity Club,” was released in May. Stockett will speak Stockett about her writing and new book, including a live conversation with the newspaper’s Jan Risher, at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 5 at The Freyhan Center, 4727 La. 426, St. Francisville — presented by The Conundrum bookshop. Admission is free. Seating is first come, first served.
Kathryn Stockett can write almost anywhere. But only for so long. When the words stop coming, she goes home to Mississippi — Church Hill, to be exact, about 30
minutes outside Natchez, where cell service is unreliable and interruptions are few. “I don’t know what it is about being away from here,” she said. “I’ll write until the words run out. And when they do, I’ll go back and sort of fill my tank.” Stockett splits her time between the Deep South and an apartment in New York’s East Village, but Mississippi remains the place that fuels her writing. Her relationship with home has shaped both of her novels — “The Help,” the 2009 debut that made her a literary star, and “The Calamity Club,” which arrived nearly 17 years later. Stockett remembers the first time she saw a stranger reading “The Help.” She was walking on a beach.
ä See STOCKETT, page 2G
Needlepoint shop moving to new location BY JOY HOLDEN
next to Merle Norman. Its new home will be at 7517 Jefferson Highway in the Jefferson Plaza shopping Baton Rouge needlepoint stitchers will center. A grand opening is scheduled for have a new place to gather when The Red Aug. 8. Edgecomb, who grew up crafting and Stitch moves to its permanent location. Owner Sarah Edgecomb, a stay-at-home “loves a hot glue gun moment,” ordered a mom for 13 years, started The Red Stitch two needlepoint kit on a whim about a year ago months ago. The Red Stitch has temporarä See NEEDLEPOINT, page 2G ily operated out of 8312 Jefferson Highway, Staff writer
The Advocate ■ theadvocate.com ■ Wednesday, August 12, 2026 ■ 2G
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Michael J. Fox to receive Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at Emmys BY JAMI GANZ
New York Daily News (TNS) NEW YORK — Michael J. Fox will receive the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award during this year’s 78th Emmy Awards for his work in advancing research into Parkinson’s disease, with which he was diagnosed in 1991. The five-time Emmy winner, 65, will receive the honor at the Sept. 14 ceremony in “recognition of his transformative contributions to Parkinson’s disease research and
NEEDLEPOINT Continued from page 1G
so she would have something to do on a lake house vacation. “I picked it up and fell in love with it,” Edgecomb said. “I finished the first canvas in two days, and then I ordered like four more.” When she returned to Baton Rouge, she went to The Elegant Needle and was excited to start her new hobby. After a year of practicing needlepoint, Edgecomb decided to open her own place for people in Baton Rouge who stitch to hang out together. “I felt that Baton Rouge needed a place that was welcoming to anyone to come and stitch, meet new people, or learn how to stitch,” Edgecomb said. “I’m basically funding my ‘she shed.’ ” The Red Stitch is Baton Rouge’s second local needlepoint shop or “LNS” as stitchers call them. Edgecomb calls her customers and friends “The Stitch Krewe,” and she welcomes others to join in on the screen-free hobby. “People are wanting to get
advocacy,” the Television Academy announced last week. “Michael J. Fox is one of television’s most beloved and enduring performers whose work has left an indelible mark on generations of audiences,” Cris Abrego, chair of the TV Academy, said in a statement. “The Televi- Fox sion Academy is proud to honor him for his extraordinary leadership in advancing Parkinson’s research, transforming pub-
To date, the MJFF is the world’s largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson’s research, having raised more than $2.5 billion toward the cause. “I know we’ve done a lot, but we haven’t cured Parkinson’s,” the “Family Ties” alum told Time earlier this year. “I’m always pushing and never happy until we get this done. We’ve changed the way people think about the disease, and we know there’s an end, and we’ll find it.” As Abrego said, Fox “continues to exemplify compassion, courage
and service, reflecting the power of one individual to drive meaningful change.” Fox and Brooks, the foundation’s CEO, appeared on the July 22 cover of THR, which named MFF the Philanthropic Organization of the Year. Fox is also nominated at this year’s Emmys, airing on NBC and streaming on Peacock, for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, for his role as Gerry in “Shrinking.” The nod marks Fox’s 19th Emmy nomination.
off their phones and reconnect socially,” Edgecomb said. “Needlepoint you can do anywhere by yourself or with people. Sorority girls are stitching at the houses together. All ages are picking it up.” The new location of The Red Stitch is double the size of the current store with more room for a sitting room, threads and canvases. Edgecomb is most excited about a back room that will be designed for stitchers to get together or for people to play mahjong. She said there will be tables that disconnect into groups of four for mahjong games or put together for needlepoint classes. “I want friends to call each other and say, ‘Meet me at The Red Stitch for an hour,’ ” Edgecomb said. “I want it to be a place for people to have a great experience and build each other up.” The grand opening was scheduled for 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Aug. 8. For more information, visit theredstitch.com. Email Joy Holden at joy. holden@theadvocate.com.
SHEPHERD
PROVIDED PHOTO
The Conundrum’s Aug. 5 Kathryn Stockett event will take place at The Freyhan Center, located at 4727 Cr-426 in St. Francisville. Originally a school built in the early 1900s, the 15,000 square-foot building reopened in September 2025 after being restored by The Freyhan Foundation.
Continued from page 1G For the first time in Tim’s memory, the pond at the summer camp went dry. The sheep weren’t moving. Vince spent his days hauling water, barrel by barrel, to the winter camp. He didn’t need another shepherd. He needed extra hands. Carver and Nottingham helped prepare camp instead. It wasn’t the week she’d imagined. She spent an hour wrestling with that. She could chase the story she’d planned or pay attention to the one unfolding. She chose the second. Later, she told me the week was the closest she has come in a long time to feeling exactly where she was supposed to be. She realized she did the same thing at home — wanting her children or her days to unfold in certain ways. On the mountain, she caught herself. Tim understands something about adjusting expectations. After high school, he left for Penn State, near his mother’s Pennsylvania Mennonite family. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, where he works in government and legislative affairs for the Navajo Nation — preparing officials from Washington to visit the reservation and preparing the reservation for visitors from Washington. In some ways, bringing Carver to his family’s land was an extension of that work. He grew up on family land with an overlook where he could see multiple states spread out below, with no light from anywhere else at night. As a boy, he often went to his favorite place, an overlook on the mountain, with his closest friend, who is half Navajo and half Guatemalan. Both boys felt different in a place where most classmates were full Navajo. Suicide touched people Tim knew. The overlook was where he went when life felt heavy or when things were just right. Last June, he married his wife there. They are expecting their first child, a son, in August. On Carver’s final day with the Benally family, Tim led her and Nottingham to the overlook, hiking to what he described as the second-highest point in Navajo territory, 10 feet shorter than the highest. There was no trail. Later, Carver told me there was a point when she became fairly certain she was going to die. She did not. The Benally family still lives with the legacy of the federal livestock reduction program that dramatically reduced Navajo flocks nearly a century ago. Hosting visitors, he believes,
lic awareness and inspiring global support through The Michael J. Fox Foundation, whose investments have accelerated scientific breakthroughs and the search for a cure.” Fox first publicly discussed his diagnosis in 1998, seven years after receiving the life-changing news. Just two years later, he co-founded his eponymous foundation alongside Deborah Brooks.
STOCKETT
Continued from page 1G
PROVIDED PHOTO
For a week, Kristyn Carver, of Mandeville, went to assist the Benally family, who are shepherds in Arizona. The Benally family has lived on this stretch of land, part of the Navaho Nation, for generations.
helps people understand life on the land and creates connections that may help preserve it for future generations. Tim said he hopes Carver’s visit is the first of many. He wants more strangers to come, work alongside his people and leave understanding more about life on Navajo land. He is already thinking about bringing his son home. Readers have asked if Carver came home with a better understanding of shepherds. She did. She learned that Vince was going to do whatever was best for the sheep, whether that meant leading them up a mountain or hauling water one barrel at a time. Vince learned shepherding from his mother, Ruth Benally — Tim’s grandmother. Ruth lived on the land until 2020. Tim remembers her sitting near the corral watching the sheep. She could tell, just by looking, which animals were sick and which were carrying lambs. Carver came home carrying something, too — not from the hike or the sheep, but from the corral. Vince repaired it with whatever was available: an old box spring, delivery pallets, worn-out shirts twisted around posts to hold everything together. Nothing wasted. Everything useful. She hasn’t stopped thinking about the possibility that the discarded parts of life might still be doing important work — might still be holding something up. She and Nottingham are already talking about going back. Anyone interested in learning more about the Navajo Nation can reach Tim directly at timothy.benally10@gmail.com. Email Jan Risher at jan. risher@theadvocate.com.
“It kind of struck me that something that I had to say was actually reaching beyond my very small circle,” she said. “In a strange way, I think the success of ‘The Help’ made me a more empathetic person.” Paired with the backlash she received for “The Help” — that the book offered a White perspective on Black experiences — Stockett said she began to write more carefully, sometimes fearfully, for years. That caution nearly cost her the new book. Stockett said she spent years scaling back what she wanted to write in “The Calamity Club,” particularly the part of the story that features prostitutes, worrying that she would draw more backlash. However, she said, when she finally stopped writing for what she thought readers wanted to hear and wrote what she believed instead, the writing process felt liberating. Anything else, she said, came out “bland and kind of milky.”
She’s a tire kicker Stockett spent three years living in Bali after her daughter’s school in Atlanta grew cliquish in ways that didn’t sit right with the family. The move gave her daughter a wider view of the world, Stockett said — something she’d wished for in her own upbringing — but it also slowed work on “The Calamity Club.” Bali moves at a different pace, and every chapter took longer. Another reason the second book took so long is that she doesn’t follow a strict writing routine. Instead, she explores every plot turn from multiple angles before deciding which direction the story should take. “I’m a tire kicker,” she said. “If I have one idea, I’ve got to look at it from eight different ways to decide if it’s a good one.” That habit explains much of what followed — why nearly 17 years passed between novels, why she discarded an entire narrator, why a historical discovery reshaped the new book and why she kept revisiting what she wanted to say after the success, and criticism, of “The Help.” At roughly 650 pages, the novel’s well-developed characters reflect that painstaking approach — a time-consuming approach that played a role in her original publisher, Penguin, dropping her contract in 2019. This created even more hurdles before she could finish and publish the second book. Readers, including The Conun-
drum’s Missy Couhig, say the book was worth the wait. Couhig said she was hooked after the first few pages and was willing to carry the more than 2-pound book under her arm through multiple airports because she literally couldn’t put it down. “I loved this book so much when I read it that I have been recommending it consistently in our bookshop ever since,” Couhig said.
Home is complicated Mississippi is, for Stockett, a place she loves and argues with in the same breath. “There were Christian people and there were good people, but the two didn’t necessarily always overlap,” she writes in “The Calamity Club.” She said she figured that out when she was young. Stockett attended a Christian school in Jackson, Mississippi, through sixth grade. She said the teachers were some of the kindest people she knew, but the belief system underneath their kindness is not one she can square with these days. Mississippi has been an easy target for a long time, and at this point, Stockett thinks it takes more courage to talk about what’s good in the state than what’s wrong with it. She wants readers to see the state’s sense of community, the hospitality, the food and the beauty. But she also writes because certain things about home keep her up at night — and she has to get them out. “I saw the hypocrisy around me,” she said. “For many, many years I did nothing to either stop it or at least to point it out. When I started writing books, that was my effort to make a change.” She hasn’t given up on home. She points to Jackson, where the arts have endured through hard years. She still talks about the wonders of its downtown art museum and the planetarium she loved as a child. She sees the city’s restaurant scene as another sign of hope and wonders whether her hometown could experience a revival akin to Detroit’s. Whatever happens, she said she wants to support her hometown and state however she can.
Why Oxford?
was the Ole Miss Oxford — and then there was The Square and the townspeople that would remain there after four years.” She wanted those two groups to collide on the page. Oxford also happened to be a place she already knew. Her brother lives there, and she counts the mayor among her friends. Stockett had been writing the novel, on and off, for seven or eight years before history changed the story. Digging into the era, she came across America’s sterilization laws — state statutes that allowed authorities to sterilize people judged unfit to reproduce, often unmarried women and those displaced, especially after New Orleans closed its Storyville red-light district — a detail that plays into “The Calamity Club.” “I was able to build that fear into these women’s psyches, that this was a real threat,” Stockett said. “This could happen to them.” She said the eugenics discovery reframed the stakes for “The Calamity Club” characters, taking them from Southern women navigating a difficult world to women whose bodies were, quite literally, not fully their own. In the author’s note at the end of the book, Stockett explains that California, not Mississippi, led the eugenics movement in the early 1900s.
Meg and Birdie “The Calamity Club” features two memorable narrators — 11-year-old Meg Lafleur and 24-year-old Birdie Calhoun. Originally, Stockett explained that there were three. She ended up cutting the third narrator, Charlie Lafleur, because the young mother’s single-minded drive — to get her daughter back — didn’t hold up across an entire narrative arc. “Anytime (Charlie) was thinking about anything other than that, it just felt kind of ancillary and beside the point,” Stockett said. “The Calamity Club” hits a different register than “The Help,” which is often remembered as a book about race told through domestic service. “The Calamity Club” is built around women closing ranks. Asked what she wants “The Calamity Club” to be remembered for, Stockett landed on one word: sisterhood. “When we come together as a group, we can solve problems so much better,” she said. “It’s also more fun, more interesting — and a little bit less frightening when women try to join the forces and tackle something.”
Stockett’s complicated relationship with home also shaped the setting of “The Calamity Club.” For the novel, she needed a town built around a university, she said. Jackson was too spread out to give her the kind of community she wanted. So she picked Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi. “It always felt like there were Email Jan Risher at jan.risher@ two Oxfords,” she said. “There theadvocate.com.
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The Tigers celebrate after defeating Coastal Carolina 5-3 in game two of the College Worl d Series finals in Omaha, Nebraska, on Sunday. The roar is restored. When Jay Johnson took over aas the LSU baseball coach in 2022, the six-time national champion Tigers were in the midst of a 13--year title drought. The Tigers returned to the top of college baseball during the 2023 season. LSU survived s a dicey regional that went to a winner-take-all final at Alex Box Stadium against upstart LLittle Rock. Then LSU dominated, sweeping the super regional and College World Series in seveen games. After Sunday and Johnson’s second national title, he has LSU threatening to reboot a dynnasty that blossomed under legendary coach Skip Bertman. No. 8 is on its way to Baton Rouge. ä SEE COMPLETE COVERAGE OF THE TIGERS’ COLLEGE WORLD SERIES WIN. PAGGE 1B
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LSU center fielder Chhris Stanfield, right, celebrates with catcher Luis Hernandez as they both score on a two-run single by left fielder Derek Curiel in the fourth inning of Game 2 of the Collegge World Series finals against Coastal Carolina on Sunday at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Neb. LSU scored four runs in the decisive inning and won 5-3 to earn its ssecond title under coach Jay Johnson in four years. BY KOKI RILEY OMAHA, Neb. — To calll anything a dynasty requires a certain level of consiistent, championship excellence. The Boston Celtic cs in the 60s, New York Yankees in the 90s and UCo onn women’s basketball in the 2010s certainly fit th he description. LSU winning five national championsh hips in 10 years under Skip Bertman definitely qualiifies. Coach Jay Johnson n’s Tigers aren’t quite there yet, but what LSU acco omplished Sunday afternoon at Charles Schwab Fielld was remarkable nevertheless and potentially the b beginning of another baseball dynasty in Baton Roug ge. For the eighth tim me in program history, and for
the second time in three seasons, LSU won the national championship. The Tigers took down Coastal Carolina 5-3 in Game 2 of the College World Series final to secure the 2025 title. “Unbelievable. I’m so proud right now,” Johnson said. “It’s not to be taken for granted being here two years ago. That was special. Greatest night of my life. “This is equal and maybe even tops it in some ways.” The win secured Johnson’s second title in four years at LSU, making him the first coach in college baseball history to accomplish that feat at the same school. The Tigers did it despite bringing back just 12 players who appeared in a game from last year’s team, adding 12 players from the transfer portal,
three junior-college recruits and 10 freshmen in the offseason. “We (added) really talented freshmen ...,” Johnson said. “In a month’s time, we were able to add Chris (Stanfield). We were able to add Anthony (Eyanson), Zac Cowan, Luis Hernandez, Danny Dickinson to those 12 guys who were the right 12 guys.” With the score tied 1-1, the fourth inning proved to be the difference between a coronation and a Game 3 on Monday. The Tigers scored four runs on a walk, a hit by pitch and four singles to take a 5-1 lead. Sophomore Jake Brown led off with a walk before a single from junior Jared Jones and a hit by pitch loaded the bases for the junior Stanfield.
Rabalais: Thesse Tigers measure up to LSU’s toweringg expectations, Page 4C
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See which Tigers made an appearance on the All-CWS team, Page 5C
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