Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

American Homer

For Clay Risen, Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War is this nation’s Iliad

April 13, 2011 Like his putative Greek forerunner, Shelby Foote was not a trained historian but a master storyteller. He wrote four well-received novels before embarking on The Civil War, including Shiloh, a fictional account of the 1862 battle. Long after completing his trilogy of history books, he continued to think of himself first and foremost as a fiction writer: “I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a novel, but I think it’s certainly by a novelist,” he said.

Read more

Entirely His Own Man

As a teenager, Hampton Sides wanted to be a rock star, and his band practiced in the same house where Shelby Foote was writing his magnum opus

April 11, 2011 Shelby Foote was the first writer I ever met, and the only writer I ever personally knew until I left my hometown of Memphis and went off to college. And so my image of what a writer was supposed to look like, sound like, and smell like, came first and foremost from him. I vaguely sensed even as a high-school teenager that I wanted to be a writer, but watching him, studying him, I couldn’t see how I could get there. I couldn’t see myself wielding a quill pen. My Southern accent was strong enough, but lacked Shelby’s beautiful custardy lilts and Delta diphthongs. And I knew I could never pull off a masterpiece of a beard like his.

Read more

Future Flight

Greg Lindsay and John D. Karsada envision a future of instant cities built around airports

April 7, 2011 Cities of the future will be built from the airport outward, suggest John D. Karsada, a city planner and business professor, and Greg Lindsay, a journalist, in their new book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. Greg Lindsay recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email about the book and its vision of the future. He will discuss and sign copies of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next on April 11 at 6 p.m. at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis.

Read more

Compassionate Crusader

Author and environmentalist Scott Russell Sanders talks with Chapter 16

April 4, 2011 ”A good book appeals to what is best in us,” Scott Russell Sanders has said, and his many fiction and nonfiction titles certainly call to our better angels. In his recent books, A Private History of Awe, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and A Conservationist Manifesto, Sanders examines such issues as environmental responsibility, social justice, the interrelatedness of geography and culture, and spiritual yearning. Next week, he will be in Nashville to headline this year’s Wendell Berry Lecture Series, sponsored by the Nashville Tree Foundation, and in Chattanooga to accept the 2011 Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In a recent email exchange with Chapter 16, Professor Sanders discussed, among other things, his vision for a culture based on caretaking rather than consumerism. Sanders will speak at 5 p.m. on April 13 in Montgomery Bell Academy’s Paschall Theater in Nashville, and at 2:30 p.m. on April 15 at the Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga.

Read more

Home is a Long Way From Here

Linda Leaming writes a fascinating memoir about finding herself, and a family, in Bhutan

April 1, 2011 Years ago, when Linda Leaming first saw photos of a friend’s trip to the Himalayan country of Bhutan, wanderlust trumped prudence, and she decided to see this overlooked dot on the map for herself. Once there, she stayed for more than a decade. Married to Bhutan: How One Woman Got Lost, Said “I Do” and Found Bliss is equal parts diary, travel guide, and history lesson—Leaming’s tribute to a culture arguably more evolved than our own. Linda Leaming will sign copies of the book from 5 to 8 p.m. on April 7 at Nashville’s Cumberland Gallery. Artwork by Leaming’s husband, Bhutanese artist Phurba Namgay, will be on display.

Read more

Seeing in the Dark

John Egerton considers a new memoir by a blind man—and the whole future of book publishing

March 17, 2011 The book business is in serious trouble. In Nashville alone, Zibart’s and Mills are so long-gone that most shoppers in their Hillsboro Village and Green Hills neighborhoods have never heard of them. Now Davis-Kidd is also gone, and OutLoud too, and Borders on West End is tiptoeing under a corporate-bankruptcy cloud. In Knoxville, Carpe Librum is shuttered. In Memphis, BookStar is gone, too, and the only remaining Davis-Kidd outlet in the state is in limbo because its Ohio-based corporate owners have filed for bankruptcy protection. Author John Egerton considers this blighted landscape and finds a ray of hope in the persistence of self-published authors like David Meador, who are helping to keep the literary embers warm in these distressing times. David Meador will discuss and autograph Broken Eyes, Unbroken Spirit at BookMan/BookWoman in Nashville on March 22 at 5 p.m.

Read more
TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING