Features | Chapter 16

Delicious Words

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng head to Tennessee to discuss What is the What as part of the 2015 Memphis Reads celebration

By Peggy Burch | October 28, 2015

October 28, 2015 The story of Valentino Achak Deng’s torturous journey as a “lost boy” of the Sudanese civil war—pursued by lions, vultures, and crocodiles, as well as “human killers”—became the celebrated 2006 novel What Is the What by Dave Eggers. Deng and Eggers are headliners for the 2015 Memphis Reads program, which will offer two free public events on November 4th and 5th.

A Killer Conference

The Killer Nashville conference brings a human touch back to the hardboiled business of crime writing

By Randy Fox | October 23, 2015

October 23, 2015 Now in its tenth year, the Killer Nashville Writers’ Conference connects writers with agents, editors, and publishers. Killer Nashville will be held at the Nashville Omni Hotel on October 29-November 1, 2015. In addition to the ticketed conference, a free public event, Killer Nashville BookCon, will be held at the Nashville Omni Hotel on October 31 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will include author presentations, book signings, exhibitors, and book vendors.

Book Excerpt: Rick Bragg’s My Southern Journey

“My Brother’s Garden”

By Rick Bragg | October 7, 2015

October 7, 2015 “I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away.” Rick Bragg will discuss My Southern Journey on October 10, 2015, at noon in Conference Room 1 of the Nashville Public Library. The event, part of the Southern Festival of Books, is free and open to the public.

Simple Living in the Suburbs

With four homeschooled kids, a popular blog, a flock of chickens, a herd of goats, and a new picture book for children, Deanna Caswell has her hands full

By Julie Danielson | August 6, 2015

August 6, 2015 Deanna Caswell, who writes the popular blog Little House in the Suburbs, has just published a beautiful new picture book, Beach House. A homeschooler and homesteader, Caswell writes regularly about self-sufficiency in the suburbs. Today Chapter 16 takes a look behind the scenes.

The Wisest, and Justest, and Best

Novelist John Pritchard remembers the great journalist John Seigenthaler

By John Pritchard | July 10, 2015

July 10, 2015 John Seigenthaler, who died last year on July 11, was perhaps the most central and admirable personality that defined the Nashville I lived in during the 1970s. He was the apotheosis of integrity and of all that was serious and good. Anybody who knew him, even if they were his political opposites, held him in lofty esteem for the moral, thoughtful, and inspiringly intelligent human being he was.

Creative Amnesia, or the Persistence of Magic

Novelist Steve Stern found his fictional world by searching for a lost Jewish tradition

By Steve Stern | June 1, 2015

June 1, 2015 I grew up wanting something I couldn’t name. I was raised in the Reform Jewish “tradition,” though the word here is gross hyperbole. The temple I attended as a kid in Memphis represented a variety of Judaism designed to be invisible, to blend indistinguishably with the Christ-haunted Southern landscape. As a consequence, I was virtually untouched by tradition and had not even an awareness of its absence. Nevertheless, one Sunday, playing hooky from confirmation class, I went exploring the old red brick pile of our temple along with a couple of partners in crime.

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher