News & Notes

October 14, 2010 If you’re the kind of reader who longs to know whether your favorite novelist writes at a desk or on a laptop, Ann Patchett has a treat for you. In today’s New York Times she explains what she loves best about the house where she lives: “I think of Eudora Welty who, at age 16, moved into the house where she would live until she was 92. She wrote her short stories at the desk in her bedroom. I write my novels in the bedroom across the hall from where we sleep.

October 11, 2010 A doctor’s hands are in danger of being replaced by an array of medical devices, fears Abraham Verghese, the former Johnson City writer and physician whose first novel, Cutting for Stone, is a national bestseller. According to a new profile in The New York Times, Verghese “is on a mission to bring back something he considers a lost art: the physical exam.

October 8, 2010 Writing tends to be a reclusive art, but Humanities Tennessee has lured 265 authors out of their garrets for the twenty-second annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word. The festival, a free event for the whole family, will be held this weekend in Nashville on Legislative Plaza. Whether your tastes run to memoirs or cookbooks, literary novels or thrillers, biographies or beach reads, picture books for the kids or adult-only fare, this year’s sessions cover the literary waterfront.

September 25, 2010 Young novelists “who have yet to learn the hard lesson that there really is no reinventing the wheel” may not understand why storytellers need to have an actual story to tell, but Ann Patchett likes a good plot: “As for me, I’m a great fan of a story,” she writes in today’s Wall Street Journal. “A tale well told can sweep up a reader in a way that dazzling characters, piercing language and startling ideas can’t manage on their own.

September 18, 2010 Silas House– the novelist, poet, and playwright who recently resigned his position at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate to head to Berea College in his native Kentucky– has long been an outspoken regional advocate for environmental preservation in the Appalachian Mountains. Today, in an op-ed piece for the Lexington Herald-Leader, House lays out an airtight case against the form of mining known as mountaintop removal and explains why “Appalachia Rising, a mass mobilization in Washington, D.C. Sept.