Editor's Note
We all know how much Dolly Parton loves books, but did you know she’s an especially big fan of Lee Smith’s work? Woman’s World recently shared a little of Dolly’s literary preferences and noted her long friendship with the storytelling legend. The Southern Festival of Books and Chapter 16 get a shout out in the piece, which links to the 2023 interview our own Tina Chambers did with Lee Smith, who described her initial meeting with “the book lady of Sevier County” at the festival many years ago.
This week at the site, Cat Acree reviews the latest book by investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling, which delves into the mysterious death of a young man and uncovers a “complicated scaffolding of lies.” The book’s details “spread out like a slow-motion lightning strike, with pieces snaking off in all directions, while Keefe faithfully tracks its primary path to the ground.”
David Wesley Williams shares some thoughts on what it means to make a pilgrimage to a famous writer’s home in his essay “Writers at Work.” “Discipline writes books. Hard work makes literary history. And the muse is a harsh quarry master,” he says. “That’s the value of visiting the working haunts of beloved writers, I think. To realize, or remember, that writing is toil.”
Jeremy Lloyd, an educator at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, reflects on his own deep relationship with nature and his career spent sharing its wonders with students in Forest Time: Footnotes to an Outdoor Education. In our excerpt from a chapter called “Nightwalking,” Lloyd writes, “Be at home in the world. Merge with the river and the forest and the salamander perched in your palm. Return home at week’s end with newfound insight. Tend it in your soul as you would a seed planted in a garden and share it with others. When the time is ripe continue the work of renewing the world already underway in yourself.”
News Roundup
- April 7 is National Black Bookstore Day. Check out the interactive directory for a bookstore near you.
- Coleman Barks, a Chattanooga native who popularized the work of Rumi, died in February at age 88. Chapter 16 interviewed Barks about his long fascination with the Sufi mystic in 2010.
- The investigative podcast Reveal traveled to Nashville to talk with artists, historians, and others hit by the cancellation of federal grants.
- Yurina Yoshikawa considered parenting, Shostakovich, and baseball in an essay on her Substack, Quiet Forte.
- A flash essay by Linda Parsons appeared in Vox Populi.
