A writer measures her life by October weekends at the Southern Festival of Books
The Southern Festival of Books is the place I came from and the place I return to, and it is the place where my literary forebears live on through the miraculous immortality of books.
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A bibliophile confronts her stash of unread books
My unread books had all survived several cullings, which meant that I must have repeatedly decided they were worth reading. So it seemed time to do just that.
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A Chapter 16 writer remembers the first moon landing
I happened to be at an afternoon performance under the tent on July 20, 1969, when the conductor suddenly halted the orchestra in mid-flight, turned to the audience, and shouted in a joyful voice, “I’ve just been informed that the Americans have landed on the moon!” Then he turned to the orchestra and whipped it into the Star-Spangled Banner.
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An author finds his own teenage ghost in a thrift-shop book
What I saw was not a dusty old book but a boy in a wheelchair by a window in a ramshackle house farther east in Tennessee—two hours away, on the Cumberland Plateau near Crossville.
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A young hitchhiker encounters two men on a lonesome Montana road
Two cowboys in a Ford Ranchero pickup truck stop and tell me I can ride thirty miles to Missoula in the truck’s back bed. There have been no cars for nearly an hour. I think for a nanosecond. Then I take the ride.
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I was transfixed by the woman’s stories and could not imagine just walking away
The elderly woman greeted everyone as though she knew them and gave each a bright smile.
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