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.
On sabbatical in Baltimore, a Nashville poet considers our shared humanity
January 29, 2016 We look over the side of the pier and wonder where footholds might help a person up, but we can’t find any. We think of last night’s drinkers, one of whom might have stumbled in. We think of despair—so many homeless, so many loves gone bad—and we think of families, but we see no one who looks any more personally involved than simply considering the hazards of his own living.
There once was a Pulitzer Prize-winner who wrote poems about the working-class people most writers never notice
January 8, 2016 When Philip Levine gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt, the room was packed. But in his introduction to the event, Vereen Bell bypassed entirely the impressive literary credentials of the Pulitzer Prize-winner. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties.
