Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Mountain Meanderings

Ben Anderson chronicles a year in the Smokies

…and poignant reminders of human habitation are the scores of cemeteries that remain inside the national park,” Anderson writes. “In some cases, the gravesites are starkly marked by fieldstones, revealing…

Contracts with the Devil

In Jennifer Haigh’s new novel, Heat and Light, energy companies choose profits over safety

…Heat and Light, addresses the calamity of fracking. Though Haigh makes it clear from the start that energy exploration inevitably carries environmental costs, she fills her novel with characters who…

To Haunt and to Goad

John Jeremiah Sullivan talks with Chapter 16 about writing nonfiction in the Internet age

…that. “Nature hides.” Chapter 16: You’ve written about situations, cultures, and sites where you felt at least partly, if not essentially, an outsider: Disneyworld, a huge Christian rock festival, and…

Shake It Off

In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson peers into the Internet abyss and challenges haters not to hate

…nightmarish cell-phone switch-on that awaited her on arrival in South Africa. Sacco was called horrible names thousands of times over by people who didn’t understand that the joke (albeit not…

Crazy in Mississippi

Jamie Kornegay’s Soil introduces a Faulknerian character stuck in a world of Internet conspiracies and noisy four-wheelers

…a successful farm but also a teaching model for sustainable agriculture. Locals, predictably, were not impressed. Here’s Kornegay explaining Mize’s motives for this project: What the naysayers didn’t understand was…

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