A new mother considers the hard-earned lessons of the NICU
August 13, 2010 Last weekend I stopped by the local baby superstore and was struck by how much our newborn’s story has diverged from the dream the store is peddling. Margaret Grace’s metal hospital crib is a far cry from the nursery suites of Buy Buy Baby.
Read moreSometimes even Janis Joplin isn’t enough of an escape
August 6, 2010 It was 1972, and my parents had exiled the family to a farm south of Nashville; the nearest town featured a Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chicken restaurant, a dime store, and a dully-lit library in the courthouse basement. What else was a fifteen-year-old girl to do but hide out in her bedroom and scream along to Janis Joplin records, or recite, in dramatic hand-over-heart fashion, T.S. Eliot’s poetry, the perfumed smoke from strawberry incense swirling in the air? Then Mrs. Caruthers sent me searching for wildflowers.
Read more
An author on book tour encounters his public
July 30, 2010 The truth was there before me from that first event at my local bookstore, when two devotees of a book they have never read—a man and a woman—got in a slugfest over who would be last to meet me, and the woman won. Somehow in the commotion, as the staff was ushering me out a side door, I knew in my heart that this was going to be a long book tour.
Read moreAn aspiring author heads to Killer Nashville, a conference designed to help unpublished writers land a book contract
July 23, 2010 Killer Nashville began in 2006 when Clay Stafford, a Franklin-based writer and film producer, threw a conference together in about four months, given a last-minute boost by the attendance of bestselling suspense-author Carol Higgins Clark. Stafford soon had a successful series, the goal of most mystery writers, on his hands. Now an international affair, Killer Nashville still pulls in big names—this year’s guest of honor is Jeffery Deaver—and offers four tracks: writing, forensics, marketing, and a fan track for public book signings and author events, as well as a contest, the Claymore Dagger Award, to honor an unpublished work worthy of publication. Chapter 16 contributor Chris Scott gives an inside look at the conference, which this year will be held August 20-22.
Read moreIt was a hard winter, and the horse had lived a long time
June 28, 2010 It was a late winter day in February when Bruce and I were sitting in the Country Boy having lunch. Laura Weaver came in looking for Bruce and told him that it looked like a horse was down over at the Big Farm. Bruce is an old-timer himself, and he knew that people often mistook sleeping horses for sick or dead ones, but he also knew that Laura was a good judge of horses and was not apt to make a mistake. He was calm, but he looked worried.
Read more
A man remembers the boy he was when his father died—or does he?
June 17, 2010 My father is buried there, in the lovely and quiet hilltop cemetery at the end of the road, the Hedgecoth family cemetery with its guarding meadow of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. He has patiently lain for decades on his side of the big bed of which the gravestone is headboard. Overhead, fox and vole, wasp and cricket, perform the rote gestures and fatal spats for which nature programs them. Us. Moles bump their heads on his pillow. Roots embrace him, trying to reach his nutrients. I will be nutritious, too, some day.
Read more
