May 12, 2010 Oprah Winfrey’s Harper Studios will join forces with Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series True Blood, to make a film version of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Memphis author Rebecca Skloot, according to an AP report today. The film will air on HBO, but no production schedule or air date has been announced.
May 5, 2010 A need to hurry up and finish seems to be encoded in the writerly DNA, particularly for novelists. Poets and short-story writers can have something finished to show after a few weeks’—or even a few days’—work, but novelists slog along in pained isolation for months and months and months and months. And all the while they suspect their friends of secretly thinking, “Yeah, sure, you’re writing a book.” To be taken seriously, to be recognized as a real writer, you have to finish the book, sell it, and get it out there.
April 28, 2010 In 1985 at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, professors David Till and Malcolm Glass founded a literary magazine which they called Zone 3, in honor of the temperate growing zone of middle Tennessee. This was a staggeringly hopeful endeavor. Even twenty-five years ago, it was not clear that poetry itself—let alone literary magazines devoted to it—would survive the twentieth century. If cable television hadn’t swamped the little boat of lyric poetry, the coming tsunami not yet known as the Internet surely would.
April 26, 2010 David Auburn, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, is the Ingram New Works Fellowship recipient, in town May 6-8 to mentor area playwrights and take part in readings of his new play The Columnist.
April 23, 2010 Somewhere in the back of the minds of most book lovers, there is probably a little corner labeled “Dream Jobs.” And among those jobs is the one that may not even really exist, but we like to think it exists, which is to sort through all of the books that come flooding daily into the offices of Harpo Enterprises. And, you know, take home the ones that look interesting. And read them. For Oprah.
April 22, 2010 Humorist and Vandy grad Roy Blount Jr., who is known both for his writing and for his NPR appearances on shows like Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me and A Prairie Home Companion, is on tour with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a garage band made up of bestselling writers Stephen King, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Scott Turow, Matt Groening, James McBride, and Mitch Albom. The band, founded in the early nineties, performs only once a year, on average, and not always with the same cast.
