Editor's Note

Chapter 16 will be taking its usual break next week for Thanksgiving, so this week we’re featuring three new essays that touch on the joys — as well as the sorrows — of love, family and gratitude. In “Rewriting the Footnotes,” Liz Garrigan speaks to the well-meaning people who see her family’s international life as a gift, overlooking the work and sacrifice that make it possible. Joe Pagetta’s “The Prayer and Preservation of Bringing Communion to the Sick” is a loving memory of his mother-in-law’s final days and the spiritual understanding they shared. And “Love Is the Map” by Amy Lyons is a tribute to finding home when home seems irretrievably lost. 

We hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

News Roundup

• Singer/songwriter/storyteller Todd Snider died last week at the age of 59. In her review of Snider’s 2014 memoir, I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like, Susannah Felts described Snider’s authorial voice as “plainspoken and profane, possessed of a searing, self-deprecating wit and a gimlet eye that he turns on both the sometimes absurd, sometimes cruel grind of the music business and his own lesser moments.”

• Sundress Academy for the Arts is holding an online auction to fund repairs at Firefly Farms. 

• The Bottom’s fifth anniversary fundraiser continues through January 9.

• Roy Burkhead is serializing his novel THE E-POSTLE on Substack.

• Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, a member of the Chattanooga-based Fellowship of Southern Writers, was remembered in The Yale Review.