What do we owe the writers who get us through our darkest days?
After a series of embarrassing encounters, it should be clear to me by now that a songwriter’s need to be thanked by a fan is in no way commensurate with my own need to thank every single one of them, but still I persist.
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How could I possibly host a book-club dinner on chipped china and a second-hand table?
June 21, 2016 With rooms the color of a dead armadillo, peeling wallpaper in the bath, and red-“brick” linoleum in the kitchen, how could I ever host a book club in my recently purchased 1958 ranch? My slapdash housekeeping would earn a wagging finger from Heloise and send Madame Bovary calling for the smelling salts.
Journalist Vince Vawter looks back on writing Paperboy, his first novel for children
May 16, 2016 “After my debut novel, Paperboy, won a 2014 Newbery Honor, a question gnawed at me: what do I know about children’s literature?” Prior to his appearance at the Children’s Festival of Reading, held in Knoxville on May 21, 2016, journalist Vince Vawter reflects on his surprising second career as a middle-grade novelist.
A writer once called his Sunday School teacher the worst name he could think of—and it haunts him still
April 29, 2016 In 1957, when I was eight years old, I called my Sunday School teacher, Miss Jeffie Lou Beecroft, a bad word. I didn’t call her the bad word to her face, but it was a very bad word, apparently the worst word I had in me at the time, and that’s what has mattered ever since.
Ray Midge didn’t lie down and give up when his wife ran off with her ex-husband, and there’s a lesson in his perseverance
April 22, 2016 I crammed down all the medication allowed me, wrapped a bag of ice around the cast and what showed of my forearm, and lowered myself onto the bed beside my wife. She did her best to talk me down. “Don’t think so much,” she said. “Try to read something.” To humor her, I reached with my good hand and picked up the first book I touched on the bedside table. It was Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South.
During the spring migration of 1965, a teenager’s unhappy parents finally find common ground
April 4, 2016 For most of my life, I had paid almost no attention to my parents’ private lives. They were just there, usually a deterrent to whatever it was I wanted to do. But our three lives intersected the spring I was sixteen, the spring when they started watching birds and I, learner’s permit in hand, started to drive.
