Editor's Note

Writers who are looking for some wintertime fellowship and guidance should mark their calendars for the Tennessee Mountain Writers January Jumpstart, scheduled for January 17-18 in Oak Ridge. Writers, readers, and publishers are also invited to participate in Appalachian Wordfest on February 28 in Sevierville. We’ll be sharing links for spring gatherings after the new year, but in the meantime, if you have a January or February book fair or literary conference you’d like us to mention, please let us know this week, since the December 15 newsletter will be our last before the holiday hiatus.

Transformation is the theme of this week’s offerings at Chapter 16. In his review of Alan May’s latest poetry collection, Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, Ian Hall writes that the poet’s “outré outlook is not escapist, preening, or needlessly cloudy, but a method of heightening the ho-hum — of revivifying all that is rundown and glanced over.” Emily Choate reviews The People’s Project: Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward, a multi-genre anthology edited Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith that aims to grapple with our era of tumultuous change. And we round out the week with Edd Hurt’s essay “Pop Polymath,” which recalls his meeting with Memphis-born music legend Alex Chilton during a transitional period in the artist’s career.

News Roundup

• A poem by Richard Tillinghast appeared in The New Criterion.

• An essay by Rolli was published in Cutleaf.

• Poems by Linda Parsons appeared in Porchlight. 

• The Slowdown featured a poem by Rita Dove.

• Ann Patchett was interviewed for Tricycle.