I was walking past Shelby Foote’s house, hidden by large pin oak trees, when I heard a lawnmower in the process of being cranked. Next came a series of curse words in an elegant Southern drawl that made swearing sound almost patrician.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
