First I was a preadolescent substitute janitor at a specialty magazine, in a gloomy old three-story house near Vanderbilt where Dad and other men (only men) chronicled the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education and pounded manual typewriters and mostly just wanted me to empty their ashtrays.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Everything That’s Beautiful by Tennessee playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder gets its world premiere tonight at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco. Crisp dialogue and poignant characterization mark the script, which follows a family struggling to start over for the sake of their transgender child.
Matthew Baker’s second story collection, Why Visit America, explores and cross-breeds multiple genres, upending readers’ expectations through alienated characters, fierce conflicts, and surreal settings.
Matthew Baker’s new story collection, Hybrid Creatures, tracks the quests of four brilliant, lonely misfits. Together they add up to something like a collage of one anguished archetype.
Novelist Adam Ross, the first new editor of The Sewanee Review since 1973, will launch the storied literary magazine’s redesign on January 31. In it, there’s enough transgression to satisfy the spirit of Tennessee Williams, whose bequest supports the Review’s publication.
March 5, 2014 Over the years, I had turned to almighty Google to find my childhood friend, but there were too many Peter Watsons out there, perhaps, or perhaps I didn’t try hard enough. One way or another, I never found any footprints pointing toward Nashville, where long ago we were running buddies—not fellow joggers, as that term has come to mean, but boys who ran around together, made mischief, and learned a little something about how the world works.
