Features | Chapter 16

Engaging Ontogeny—and Animal Sex

Michael Sims discusses biological and literary creativity

By Maria Browning | July 2, 2021

From the Chapter 16 archive: Where do babies come from? It may be a child’s question, but the answer is far from simple, especially if we consider the baby-making processes of the whole animal kingdom, as Michael Sims does in his companion to the National Geographic Channel’s television special of the same name, In the Womb: Animals. It features ultrasound images of fetal animals that are so detailed and vivid it’s almost hard to believe they aren’t simulations.

Time Travel with McCarthy

An outdoor homage to Suttree and Knoxville’s past

By Maria Browning | June 29, 2021

On July 8 at Knoxville’s Lakeshore Park, “Suttree’s Knoxville: A Hymn to the Past in Film & Music” will combine live music, readings from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, and a film of archival footage to evoke a sense of the city as it was 70 years ago.

Costly Redemption

William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart is an homage to Twain

By Frye Gaillard | June 1, 2021

Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart, the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer, and the other writers who figured out how the scenes fit together, the effort was worth it, a forensic labor of love they feel even now for a writer who died in 2012.

Our Town

I’ll Take You There is a collaborative guide to places in Nashville shaped by social justice work

By Kim Green | May 10, 2021

I’ll Take You There, edited by Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. and written by more than 100 local contributors, guides readers to Nashville places shaped by resistance to power and injustice.

Afrofuturism and the Art of Seeing

Reflections on Tales of Wakanda and the visionary literature of the African diaspora

By Ciona Rouse | May 3, 2021

Black authors, along with visual artists, musicians, designers, and activists, have long learned to zip into the cloak of art we now call Afrofuturism to imagine possible futures that embrace truly liberated Black bodies and stories. Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, an anthology edited by Memphis native Jesse J. Holland, joins this tradition through multiple perspectives on the world of Marvel’s T’Challa.

Guiding Us Through Grief

With gratitude for Edward Hirsch and his expansive body of work

By Maria Isabelle Carlos | April 6, 2021

With over 2.7 million lives lost worldwide in just one year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic — nearly 550,000 in the United States alone — there are few poets whose work is more suited to guide us through this overwhelming grief than Edward Hirsch, who has said, “We need poetry to help us transform the oceanic depths of feeling into art.” Hirsch will appear at a virtual event hosted by Vanderbilt University on April 8.