Editor's Note
More than a century ago, Rebecca Rose Mooradian’s great-grandmother Dzovinar escaped the Armenian Genocide. Mooradian has turned that story of survival into her debut picture book, Rose by the Sea. Today at Chapter 16, Margaret Kingsbury interviews the author about what moved her to write the story and what she hopes children might learn from her great-grandmother’s experience. Noting that Dzovinar would not have survived if a Turkish family had not hidden her, Mooradian says, “The world is full of so much sadness, but more than that, it’s full of goodness. It’s full of love.”
Mark Mayer’s About, Above, Around: 50 Prepositions pays tribute, through a collection of short fiction, to an underappreciated part of speech. Reviewer Sean Kinch writes that “Mayer’s bite-size narrative nuggets create a genre of their own, ambiguous ruminations on/with/inside language that enrich our conceptual lexicon.”
And speaking of finding value in what’s underappreciated, Caroline Siegrist’s essay “Miss Betty’s Week” recalls a folksy newspaper column she once laughed at and notes the way life as a mom in the suburbs has given her a new understanding of its value. “As I’ve gotten older,” she writes, “I feel an odd deference for Miss Betty and her tireless documenting of her own ordinary life. Maybe she knew that there is power and beauty in the ordinary, the careful art of paying attention.”
News Roundup
- The Porch in Nashville will host SLANT Creative Writing Camps for youth in July.
- Dolen Perkins-Valdez discussed Happy Land with Emily Raboteau for Orion Magazine.
- Learotha Williams is the new Davidson County Historian.
- Ann Patchett, country music artist Brittney Spencer, and Rep. Justin Jones gathered with students at the Tennessee State Capitol for the second annual Literary Day on the Hill.
- National Association of Black Bookstores has published an interactive directory of Black bookstores across the U.S.
