This year, downtown Hattiesburg celebrated Halloween early. On a cloudy June afternoon, costumed children carved watermelons and tossed rings onto bottles in the middle of the then-closed East Front Street. Vendors lined either side of the road and sold wood burnings, jewelry and other crafts under their tent-covered tables. The earthy smell of incense perfumed the air, smoke rising to meet the heavy cumulonimbus clouds that promised rain from high overhead.

Murph and Erin Little set up their own stand outside of The Author Shoppe, the bookstore the married couple have owned together since 2020. While the Littles were sellers at this festival, they were also its organizers. The idea for what would come to be known as The Haunting on Front Street started as a fundraising suggestion from one of The Author Shoppe’s regular customers. The Littles are currently in the process of purchasing a new building, and as a local business without the financial security to comfortably buy property, the Littles have turned to their customers for support.

“We have an awesome group of customers who have become friends and who, when we started talking about buying a building, they wanted to help us in any way that they could,” Erin Little said. “So we sat down one day, and we just had a brainstorming session. And one of our college students mentioned Summerween.”

Taking inspiration from an episode of the Disney animated series “Gravity Falls” by the same name, Summerween is a practice that is exactly as it sounds: Halloween celebrated during the summer. It is an informal holiday that is slowly gaining traction across the United States. The fan-made observation has no set date, and practices vary, but the event is at its heart a celebration of the October aesthetic in the warmer quarter of the year. For Murph Little (who said he has not seen the source material but loved the idea), this holiday isn’t just an excuse to celebrate Halloween. It’s also an opportunity to recreate a childhood experience, one he hoped the Hattiesburg community would revel in through their event.

“There’s such an innocence about the whole idea of Summerween,” Little said. “It’s about looking for another chance to be a kid again and giving another chance for kids to have a place to play festival games and stuff like that. It just sounded fun for us. And the hope is that if you think something is fun, other people will think it’s fun, too.”

To make The Haunting on Front Street a reality, Erin Little contacted the local arts and crafts vendors with whom she has connected over her time as a Hattiesburg small-business owner. Little hoped that the Summerween event would not only raise money for The Author Shoppe but benefit their neighbors and vendors as well. Photo by Gaven Wallace

Erin Little claimed that what drew her to the idea of Summerween was the passion for Halloween that she noticed within The Author Shoppe’s customer base. But Halloween is also a personal passion for Little as well. Her parents prevented her from celebrating the holiday as a child, and she reclaimed that opportunity to celebrate the holiday in her adult life.

“Growing up in a very conservative Christian household, Halloween was not something that I was allowed to celebrate as a kid. So as an adult, I’ve kind of leaned into it,” Little said.

The Author Shoppe celebrates Halloween with a number of events as Oct. 31 approaches. The main event is Dead Author’s Eve, a night where the business hosts a live reading and encourages patrons to listen while dressed as their favorite dead author or literary character. To Erin Little, this kind of event “seems like a no-brainer.”

“A lot of our customers love any chance to dress up,” Murph Little said. “When the excuse is given, they have ideas for a costume or a costume already prepared. It’s great to give them that chance.”

The Littles viewed summer as the best opportunity to provide an event like The Haunting on Front Street because the months are something of a “downtime” in Hattiesburg, they explained. Many students who are usually living at or near one of the universities near the city during the fall and spring vacate Hattiesburg over summer break, so not as many festivals are planned during those months.

Murph and Erin Little both graduated with master’s degrees in English from William Carey University in 2017. In 2020, they opened their bookstore The Author Shoppe in downtown Hattiesburg with support from their former professor Dr. Allison Chestnut. Through their business, the Littles hope to spread their love of reading and build a community with their customers. Photo by Gaven Wallace

Murph Little said that events like theirs feel especially important to hold around holidays when many people who don’t have families to celebrate with miss out on notable moments of community-building. All of this speaks to what Erin Little identifies as The Author Shoppe’s primary mission: fostering a sense of community among Forrest County residents.

“Our goal here at The Author Shop is to create a community and to create safe spaces for that community to happen,” she said. “And if we can provide an event where it’s free and open to the public, where they can feel comfortable and confident, that’s what we want to do.”

‘Creating a Place Where Art Can Happen’

To make up for the projected future costs of The Author Shoppe’s new location, the Littles are dedicating the time until their move to raising money from their customer community. The Haunting on Front Street was a major event in this fundraising campaign, and the Littles raised around $500 after accounting for the event’s initial costs.

As local bookstore owners, the Littles are anxious about the financial strain that their new location entails. On top of the high cost of purchasing a building in downtown Hattiesburg, the Littles plan to finalize this purchase before their current lease is up. While they will be allowed to sublet their current building, Erin expects that they may have to pay the rent and utility fees of their current building for a few months alongside the mortgage of the new one.

“It’s exciting, but it’s also very stressful because there are a lot of unknowns,” Little said. “As a small business—especially in our situation—there’s not a nest egg. We don’t have very much to fall back on.”

While personal fundraising was something the Littles had in mind when organizing the Haunting on Front Street, The Author Shoppe was not the only business they hoped to raise funds to support. Rather, Erin Little expressed the couple’s hope that this event would attract consumers who would patronize the other businesses along Front Street. Some of these vendors in particular had recently suffered financial losses due to this year’s stormy summer season, so Little wanted to help in some way.

“A couple of our vendors were impacted by a storm recently. and they lost some of their merchandise. So this event was an opportunity to help them cushion that blow,” Little said.

Once hosting the United Way of Southeast Mississippi, Hattiesburg’s 210 W. Front Street is the future home of The Author Shoppe. This new building, which in total spans more than 5,000 square feet, will feature an outdoor patio and multiple retail spaces, amenities that the Littles believe will help them to further build their bookstore’s appeal. Photo by Gaven Wallace

From here, The Author Shoppe will continue its fundraising campaign with a pledge drive on August 3rd that Little claims will mimic “an old PBS telethon.” The Author Shoppe plans to host readers, musicians and acts from the community to spread awareness of their fundraising efforts and garner further support.

“That’s gonna take a lot of manpower,” Erin Little said about the August event. “And thankfully, we have a good bit of manpower. And that’s—I couldn’t imagine trying to do it by myself—that’s overwhelming.”

By purchasing the new building at 210 W Front St., Murph Little hopes that the bookstore can be a “café society,” somewhere artists can meet and collaborate. The future location will have multiple retail spaces and an outdoor patio, giving the venue an opportunity to become “a place where art can happen,” Little hopes.

“You put two authors in the outdoor patio, and now you have a writing and reading spot with a bookshop right there,” Little said. “It strengthens what we want to do here in Hattiesburg; it draws more people in, and hopefully drawing more people in gets them to talk more. Then, ideas are interchanged, and friendships are created.”

Erin said that the community that they have built through their business thus far has had a powerful effect on her life. The co-owner recalled that when she first came to Hattiesburg, she was not aware of how badly she was lacking a feeling of community. It was only after The Author Shoppe became more established and their customers more familiar that Little fully understood the benefits that being part of an active, supportive community can entail.

“You don’t realize how much of that you’re lacking until you get it, right? And it improves not just your social life obviously but impacts your mental health in a big way,” Little said.

The Haunting on Front Street was a celebration of Summerween, the practice of celebrating Halloween early in during the summer months. While the holiday is unofficial and practices vary, one of the more common Summerween traditions is to carve watermelons instead of pumpkins. Maria Englert, a Hattiesburg pumpkin carver who has won multiple local competitions for her art, taught families how to carve watermelons at The Haunting on Front Street. Photo by Gaven Wallace

The bookshop owners believe that the community they have fostered is especially important because they chose to build it around literature. To the Littles, books offer an avenue for education and information that is accessible to anyone with the skills to read them, even if those skills are not necessarily “scholarly.”

“Reading is something that we believe very strongly in,” Erin Little said. “Even if your child or your teenager or your parent is maybe not the strongest reader, or maybe they don’t feel like they’re the most scholarly person, they can still pick up a book and read it and learn something.”

While recreational readers have the opportunities to purchase books from online and chain booksellers, supporting small businesses like The Author Shoppe puts more dollars into the local economy, Little added. Cities incentivize chain businesses to open locations through tax breaks that locally owned establishments do not receive. In turn, local bookstores contribute a greater percentage of their profits to state taxes, funds the Littles argue trickle down to cities like Hattiesburg.

“We are paying for your schools to operate,” Erin said. “We’re paying your teachers, we are paving your streets. By investing in a small business, you’re investing in your infrastructure.”

For more information on The Author Shoppe and its offerings, visit authorshoppe.com.

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The Haunting on Front Street: Hattiesburg Bookstore Celebrates ‘Summerween,’ Fosters Literary Community

‘Creating a Place Where Art Can Happen’

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