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# Chapter 16

A Community of
 Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://chapter16.org/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [“To See Small Fish in High Branches”](https://chapter16.org/to-see-small-fish-in-high-branches/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on May 19, 2022. *** To See Small Fish in High Branches My eyeballs’ curvature feathers the forest. I choose precision binoculars, barium glass crisping texture and edge. This crystal amplifies the air’s flux of lumens, gathers them up like stray contours and plumes. A bird
- [Quintessential Observer](https://chapter16.org/quintessential-observer/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on June 21, 2022. *** Brandon Taylor, the Alabama-born writer whose 2020 debut novel, Real Life, was a finalist for the Booker Prize, tries to avoid setting his stories in the South. “I didn’t feel like I could write about the South because I was too
- [Raise the Roof for Tennessee Women and Title IX](https://chapter16.org/raise-the-roof-for-tennessee-women-and-title-ix/) - Historian Mary Ellen Pethel’s latest project combines her twin passions for history and sports. In Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers, Pethel measures the impact of 50 years of Title IX legislation on Tennessee women’s athletics in higher education. By telling the stories of 50 Tennessee women, she makes a compelling case for the
- [History in the Making](https://chapter16.org/history-in-the-making/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on October 20, 2022. *** I first saw Alora Young perform at Nashville’s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. in 2020. A talented performer, Young spit crisp lines about racism in present-day America that were interspersed with bars of song. In Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir
- [Tales of a Preservationist](https://chapter16.org/tales-of-a-preservationist/) - “Storytelling is in our blood, as Appalachians,” says Silas House in an interview included in Silas House: Exploring an Appalachian Writer’s Work. “It is part of us. The act of telling a story is the act of preservation, so I often think of myself as a preservationist by being a writer. In a way that’s
- [Something That Wants to Live](https://chapter16.org/something-that-wants-to-live/) - Readers who fell in love with Silas House’s writing after the release of his widely acclaimed 2018 novel, Southernmost, will likely have that love deepened by Lark Ascending, the author’s latest work of fiction, as it pulls off the difficult task of being an apocalyptic novel that is truly harrowing, yet even more deeply affecting
- [Why Am I Alive?](https://chapter16.org/why-am-i-alive/) - At first glance, Michael Farris Smith, known for novels that explore the kudzu-darkened backroads of Mississippi, seems a world away from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer who coined the phrase “The Jazz Age” to capture the glitz of New York City in the 1920s. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become a byword for high-class debauchery,
- [Scarred Souls](https://chapter16.org/scarred-souls/) - Michael Farris Smith’s new novel Salvage This World begins with a woman on the run. Jessie, a young mother in an unnamed hamlet of coastal Mississippi, “scoops” her child and dashes into nearby woods. To elude her pursuers, she trudges through a swamp, holding her son in one arm and wielding a gun with the
- [Eternal Questions, Evolving Answers](https://chapter16.org/eternal-questions-evolving-answers/) - “I confess that I myself do not believe in miracles,” writes Alan Lightman in his essay collection Probable Impossibilities. In its clarity and gentleness, that sentence embodies the character of much of Lightman’s writing, from the delicate fiction of Einstein’s Dreams (1992) to the spiritual exploration in his 2018 book of essays, Searching for Stars
- [The Wonder of It All](https://chapter16.org/the-wonder-of-it-all/) - Author, physicist, and MIT professor Alan Lightman has spent his career pondering big questions about big ideas: Do multiverses exist? What was there, if anything, before the Big Bang? Could there have been multiple Big Bangs? Where do science and miracles intersect? He has explored such ideas in his scientific work and his award-winning fiction
- [A World Beyond](https://chapter16.org/a-world-beyond/) - “Some experiences are simply not reducible to zeros and ones,” Alan Lightman writes in the introduction to The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. That truth inspires the question at the heart of this new book and much of his other writing in recent years, from the 2009 narrative poem Song of Two
- [The Myth and the Man](https://chapter16.org/the-myth-and-the-man/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on May 15, 2023. The post has been updated with new publication and event information. *** It might seem that Martin Luther King Jr. is more a myth than a man. Thanks to his soaring oratory and moral courage, he has emerged in popular memory as
- [An Enlightened Message](https://chapter16.org/an-enlightened-message/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on June 23, 2o23. *** Nature’s Messenger: Mark Catesby and His Adventures in a New World, the second book from Sewanee-based writer Patrick Dean, relates the history of a little-known man and his greatest achievement. It’s a formula Dean mastered in his 2021 book, A Window
- [Discovering the Soil All Over Again](https://chapter16.org/discovering-the-soil-all-over-again/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This article originally appeared on June 14, 2022 *** On Valentine’s Day 2008, I spent an afternoon talking with an East Tennessee legend, John Rice Irwin, founder of the Museum of Appalachia. Our interview was conducted beside a crackling fireplace, interrupted only by a delicious homemade lunch from the museum’s
- [Disaster-Colored Glasses](https://chapter16.org/disaster-colored-glasses/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on April 4, 2022. The post has been updated with new publication details. *** When Nashville author Mary Laura Philpott was in college, her father regularly sent care packages from home. But instead of the typical homemade-cookies-and-encouraging-notes variety, his packages were filled with canned goods —
- [A Piercing Wail](https://chapter16.org/a-piercing-wail/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on January 30. 2023. *** There’s a line in Reckoning, the latest book by V (formerly Eve Ensler), in which she shares her frustration with getting people to understand what abuse, particularly rape, does to women. “I have tried it with data and detachment, passion and
- [Europe’s Bloody Borderlands](https://chapter16.org/europes-bloody-borderlands/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on January 24, 2012. *** Exactly seventy years after the fateful Wannsee Conference at which the Nazi leadership approved the implementation of the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem,” there are few Americans unaware of the tragic and unparalleled scale of the slaughter suffered by those
- [“Poem for a Chattanooga Night Club”](https://chapter16.org/poem-for-a-chattanooga-night-club/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on May 26, 2022. *** Poem for a Chattanooga Night Club i’m sitting here at a gay bar in the south & this queen is performing & she’s dressed like a genie & her name is Glistening Goddess & after the show she comes over to
- [Slow Violence, Then and Now](https://chapter16.org/slow-violence-then-and-now/) - A chemical explosion in Bhopal, India. The extraction of natural resources from the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Cluster bombing in the Middle East. The threat of massive evacuation of the Maldives, due to global climate change. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon chronicles such crises across the Global South, while
- [Vilified and Celebrated](https://chapter16.org/vilified-and-celebrated/) - In the early 1990s, the Geto Boys blasted their way into the national conversation. Cultural conservatives decried the profane, irreverent hip-hop group from Houston that featured Bushwick Bill, a short person who boasted, in one famous track, that “Size Ain’t S---.” In Why Bushwick Bill Matters, Charles L. Hughes blends biography, cultural analysis, and personal
- [The Natural](https://chapter16.org/the-natural/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on February 24, 2021 *** The title of Andrew Maraniss’ new book, Singled Out, captures the predicament that Glenn Burke faced in the 1970s. As a baseball player with an Adonis physique and extraordinary athletic gifts, Burke stood out even among his major league teammates. An
- [“A House in the Country”](https://chapter16.org/a-house-in-the-country/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on June 29, 2022. *** A House in the Country In memory of Caro Armstrong As a child I played at being invisible to my elders, who had their own lives to live. At times it seems unreal now, even to me. They gave me
- [Gratitude and Loss](https://chapter16.org/gratitude-and-loss/) - The title of Angela Tucker’s You Should Be Grateful echoes the misguided comments people sometimes make to adoptees, especially the ones who admit that they have mixed emotions about being adopted. The book opens with a 10-point “Adoptee Manifesto” that includes the line “It’s okay to feel a mixture of gratitude and loss.” Validating the
- [A Light on in the Mica Windows](https://chapter16.org/a-light-on-in-the-mica-windows/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on September 7, 2021. *** Near the beginning of Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Joy Harjo recalls her ability as a small child to leave her body at night. Rising up, she would see herself wrapped in a blanket on her small cot, then move through the
- [The Sublime and the Ridiculous](https://chapter16.org/the-sublime-and-the-ridiculous/) - “How does an idea, long dormant, revive and parade its bright banner into life as a fully renewed goal?” asks the narrator of Richard Ford’s latest novel, Be Mine. “To be happy — before the gray curtain comes down. Or at least to consider why you’re not, if you’re not. And whether it’s worth the
- [Carrying the Fire](https://chapter16.org/carrying-the-fire/) - If literature were sport, the Nobel Prize would be the Olympic gold medal, Super Bowl, and World Series all rolled up into one. Which explains why the odds-makers at Ladbrokes.com, in the run-up to the announcement this morning of the 2010 Nobel prizewinner, Mario Vargas Llosa, were taking bets on who would be the next
- [Human Drama](https://chapter16.org/human-drama/) - Chris Offutt introduced readers to Army CID investigator Mick Hardin and his rural Kentucky community in 2021 with The Killing Hills, the first of a series of thrillers balancing murder and crime with loyalty and humor. Shifty’s Boys followed in 2022, and 2023 brings a third novel, Code of the Hills, taking Mick back to
- [A Few of Many Views of a (Possibly) Gentle Man’s Gentle Son](https://chapter16.org/a-few-of-many-views-of-a-possibly-gentle-mans-gentle-son/) - My father’s mother wanted “a gentle man” for a second husband, unlike the first. I don’t know about the first, because he died long before my birth and my father rarely mentioned him. When he did, it would be in reference to my grandfather’s car or to some special, posh dinners out in old Albany,
- [No Laughing Matter?](https://chapter16.org/no-laughing-matter/) - “When you hear of a friend’s marriage breaking up,” writes Memphis native Harrison Scott Key in the first chapter of How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, “it’s always like, ‘Really? No way. What happened?’” The humorous memoir details his wife’s infidelity, the near total collapse of their marriage, and the
- [The Path to Authentic Voice](https://chapter16.org/the-path-to-authentic-voice/) - Ruta Sepetys’ latest book, You: The Story, is a writer’s guide to mining one’s life for material. Sepetys is, of course, the award-winning, bestselling author of five works of historical fiction for young adult readers, and her approach to craft is form-bending, cogent, saturated with glimmering personal vignettes, and unfailingly encouraging. Neither hatchet woman nor
- [More Than One Life](https://chapter16.org/more-than-one-life/) - Lee Smith is something of a ringer. Her many novels and short stories may at first appear to feature merely charming Southern hallmarks—the landscapes and tales of Appalachia, put-together ladies who sometimes get feisty, and skirmishes between propriety and desire. These traditional Southern elements do suffuse Smith’s work, but like any master storyteller, she pushes
- [Polished Jewels](https://chapter16.org/polished-jewels/) - There must have come a moment, somewhere during the writing of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, in which Margaret Renkl was asked to describe her work-in-progress. And I would like to have been there when she did, to see the doubt and bafflement torque the listener’s face. For how can any
- [Like a Tree Wrapped in Barbed Wire](https://chapter16.org/like-a-tree-wrapped-in-barbed-wire/) - Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones is a Southern Gothic page-turner that’s as thoughtful as it is suspenseful. The novel centers on 36-year-old Nicola Bennett who, upon her mother’s death, returns to her Blue Ridge hometown of Tyndall, where her childhood friend Lauren Ballard tragically disappeared 20 years ago. Stewart deftly shifts the story between past
- [A Happy Marriage of Flavors](https://chapter16.org/a-happy-marriage-of-flavors/) - As a child in Gujarat, India, Vishwesh Bhatt measured spices at his mother’s side. As a young man, having emigrated to the United States with his family at age 18, Bhatt followed his passion for the culinary arts and saw it blossom and bear fruit. Some 20 years ago, having planted roots anew in the
- [Sins of the Father](https://chapter16.org/sins-of-the-father/) - “Very few of the boys I grew up with had finished high school, but they accepted that I was a writer,” Chris Offutt writes in the opening pages of My Father, the Pornographer. “I was merely doing what other men did—following in my father’s footsteps. Sonny was a plumber. The son of a local drunk
- [Paradise Lost](https://chapter16.org/paradise-lost/) - Included on countless “best of” lists in 2012, Lauren Groff’s gorgeous second novel, Arcadia, is a loving and lyrical story of the rise and fall of a commune from the late 1960s through the end of the twentieth century. It is also the coming-of-age tale of Ridley Sorrell Stone, known as Bit, the first baby
- [American as Apple Pie](https://chapter16.org/american-as-apple-pie/) - “‘How American,’ Ólafur said with a sneer, his voice a little cold. ‘Happiness.’” With his second novel, The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor invites us into a study on the intersection of loneliness, belonging, and being happy. The story centers around the lives of a hodgepodge of individuals living in Iowa City. They are dancers and
- [Summer Reading](https://chapter16.org/summer-reading/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on June 29, 2018. *** A week after I finished first grade, my father drove me back to the elementary school. As we turned into the parking lot, I saw the principal standing outside the building. It was much later when I realized that no man
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- [Performing Womanhood](https://chapter16.org/performing-womanhood/) - Why Tammy Wynette Matters ventures beyond the usual narrative of Tammy Wynette as a tragic country star whose numerous marriages and early death have often defined her. In this slim yet rich book of criticism, Steacy Easton considers the singer’s “ambitious, transparent, and haunted work” in a feminist context, drawing out Wynette’s artistry and paying
- [Call of the Wild](https://chapter16.org/call-of-the-wild/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Sounds Wild and Broken was recently selected as a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. This review originally appeared on February 22, 2022. *** “Sound is ephemeral,” writes David George Haskell, a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of South, in his preface to
- [“To the Aliens, Letter #4”](https://chapter16.org/to-the-aliens-letter-4/) - To the Aliens, Letter #4 (Bamboo thickening along the June fence line; legs sore after a failed swim) Know that I know — not once did you appear angry. Not once did you appear sinister, bulky, awkward, ill-conceived, uncertain, filmy, reckless, ardent, restive, imaginary, aggressive, transitive, bleary, or rooted — only a
- [Gardening for Fun and … Profit?](https://chapter16.org/gardening-for-fun-and-profit/) - I’d never been an outdoors kind of gal. I mowed the yard once — over 20 years ago. After stumbling in a hole and wrenching my sciatic nerve, I gave the chore back to my husband, Rich. When Rich and I achieved senior citizen status, we hired a man to mow our relatively flat (by
- [Traditions Are Elastic](https://chapter16.org/traditions-are-elastic/) - In her book Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia, Emily Hilliard presents what she calls “visionary folklore.” Her work is grounded in the present and looks to the future rather than simply focusing on preservation of the past. She sidesteps nostalgia in favor of a cooperative approach that catalogs long-running traditions
- [Poisonous Dealings](https://chapter16.org/poisonous-dealings/) - Baroness Marie Catherine has done her duty as a daughter and a wife, faithfully enduring a stay at a convent as a young woman to learn fealty, then bearing the advances of her foul-breathed husband as he tried to garner a male heir. After numerous miscarriages and several years of tense marriage, Marie Catherine has
- [New Americana](https://chapter16.org/new-americana/) - Scott Gloden was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, but “claims Memphis and New Orleans as homelands” according to Hub City Press, publisher of his debut story collection The Great American Everything. The collection received Hub City’s 2021 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, given annually to an emerging writer from a Southern state.
- [Memories of Massacre](https://chapter16.org/memories-of-massacre/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on March 3, 2020. *** On May 1, 1866, after a conflict between white policemen and Black soldiers, mobs of whites rampaged through the Black community in Memphis. By May 3, 48 people had died, and all but 2 were African American. Women were raped. Homes
- [Lights! Camera! Comic Books!](https://chapter16.org/lights-camera-comic-books/) - The thing to remember about The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, the first novel from actor Tom Hanks, is that 10 minutes into the book, most readers will forget who wrote it. Yes, they may at first imagine Hanks’ familiar voice as that of Joe Shaw, the freelance journalist and film studies professor
- [Bonds Across Time and Space](https://chapter16.org/bonds-across-time-and-space/) - As with many English idioms, “doubting Thomas” traces its origins to the New Testament: The Gospel of John recounts the Apostle Thomas’ skepticism about the Resurrection until Jesus appears in person, prompting the dubious one to reverse his position. Inspired, Thomas embarked on spreading the Good News abroad. One legend claims he sailed to the
- [Affrilachia from A to Z](https://chapter16.org/affrilachia-from-a-to-z/) - Black luminaries, Black history, and the geographic, spiritual, and emotional spaces that hold resonance for Black people in Appalachia: These are the elements of Frank X Walker's A Is for Affrilachia. This alphabet picture book, at more than 60 pages, is for readers of all ages. Walker, the first African American writer to be named
- [Nothing More Autobiographical](https://chapter16.org/nothing-more-autobiographical/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on April 9, 2018. *** In a review of Richard Ford's Canada included in her new collection, See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary, Lorrie Moore describes Ford as "a writer of jangling personal fascination to many in the literary world." She might as
- [As the Story Goes](https://chapter16.org/as-the-story-goes/) - Once Upon a Camel, Kathi Appelt’s newest novel for young readers, is ambitious, to say the least. It’s the story of Zada, a camel who lives in the foothills of West Texas in the year 1910. When a mighty dust storm strikes and Zada’s kestrel friends are whisked away, she lodges their chicks atop her
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- [A Lot of Patience and a Dumpster](https://chapter16.org/a-lot-of-patience-and-a-dumpster/) - Memphis native Elizabeth Passarella’s second collection of funny essays, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway, covers a lot of ground, both personally and existentially. She writes, “If the wildness and brokenness of the past few years have taught me anything, it is that whatever you think is solid in this world will shift, and that
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- [A Part, a Whole, a Root, a Bloom](https://chapter16.org/a-part-a-whole-a-root-a-bloom/) - “The point of botany is not to distinguish between value and waste,” Katy Simpson Smith writes in her irresistible new novel, The Weeds. “It’s to be honest about what something is. A part, a whole, a root, a bloom. Conditions, habits.” The Weeds follows the entwined stories of two unnamed women, working in different centuries,
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- [Trailblazers in Space](https://chapter16.org/trailblazers-in-space/) - Meredith Bagby, nonfiction writer and political reporter and producer for CNN, demonstrates journalism at its best in The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel, her comprehensive account of NASA’s 1978 Astronaut Class 8. Bagby approached the book with the passion of a dedicated researcher,
- [Life and Love on “The Rock”](https://chapter16.org/life-and-love-on-the-rock/) - Our lives are full of images we wish we could unsee, whether childhood traumas or the terrible accident on the way home from work. Or a notorious American prison, closed for 60 years. Last summer when I told my neighbor I wasn’t interested in seeing Alcatraz on my trip to San Francisco, she said, “Oh,
- [Not Too Blue](https://chapter16.org/not-too-blue/) - Singer-songwriter and three-time Grammy winner Lucinda Williams writes in her memoir Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You that when she first came to Nashville she didn’t have “a very good attitude” about the city. “I hated what had happened to country music,” she writes. “I had trouble with the idea of two, three,
- [Southernified](https://chapter16.org/southernified/) - Every so often, my neighbor Horton will send me a text message. They go something like, “I dug up some shallots this morning. I have them layin out sunnin” or “Would you like some spinach? I’ve washed it, but it may need some more checkin.” It’s the purest form of Southern hospitality from a born
- [When They Decide It’s Spring](https://chapter16.org/when-they-decide-its-spring/) - “Domestic poem. No hunts, / no kills,” Anna Laura Reeve writes in the opening “Ars Poetica” of her debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility. Then the poem turns and tunes itself: “But here on a steel rail, / frozen, till painful to the touch, / and miles from civilization, I put
- [Being There](https://chapter16.org/being-there/) - The ripping pain that assails a mother with a demanding job is constant. Every day she is away from her children, it hurts, writes Mary Louise Kelly in her book It. Goes. So. Fast. The list of lost moments is long: “All those weekly soccer games when I showed up late, or failed to make
- [Extinguishing Shadows](https://chapter16.org/extinguishing-shadows/) - In the iconic photograph from April 4, 1968, six men are on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Martin Luther King Jr. is lying in a pool of blood. Four others point up at the boardinghouse from where a shot rang out. The sixth man — kneeling over King, tending to him —
- [The Imagined Country](https://chapter16.org/the-imagined-country/) - Charles Frazier’s novels possess scope and grandeur. His characters may begin life on dirt farms or parched Indian reservations, but in Frazier’s hands their quests take on epic dimensions. His latest novel, The Trackers, contributes another installment to his rewriting of the American mythos. His intention is to shift the focus of our national story
- [The Goodness of the Game](https://chapter16.org/the-goodness-of-the-game/) - In 1994, Ryan McGee’s spring and summer were filled with epic mascot battles, wannabe national anthem singers, and a stuntman in a coffin packed with explosives. These stories are shared in Welcome to the Circus of Baseball, a memoir covering McGee’s time as an intern for the Asheville Tourists. In the decades since his season
- [The Boy Beneath the Hero](https://chapter16.org/the-boy-beneath-the-hero/) - Daniel Wallace is best known for Big Fish, his 1998 debut novel, and its star-studded 2003 film adaptation by director Tim Burton. Since then he has produced a steady stream of comically odd Southern fiction, most recently Extraordinary Adventures in 2017. His first nonfiction book, This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of
- [Supremes and Extremes](https://chapter16.org/supremes-and-extremes/) - In 1991, President George H.W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice in the court’s history and a lion of liberalism. Thomas, however, tilted the court rightward, a shift that keeps reverberating into the present day. In The Transition, Daniel Kiel investigates how these two justices
- [Stronger Stuff](https://chapter16.org/stronger-stuff/) - The first thing to know about Jeannette Walls’ new novel Hang the Moon is the old adage, don’t judge a book by its cover. The black-and-white image of a woman lying under a dawn-of-automobiles car, apparently tinkering with it, suggests a whimsical story. The thin, feminine legs — knees pursed together, of course, so as
- [Crime, Culture, and Complicity](https://chapter16.org/crime-culture-and-complicity/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This article originally appeared on August 18, 2022. *** Beverly Lowry’s 10th book weaves true crime with a memoir of the post-WWII South. Focused on the brutal killing of a Mississippi socialite, Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta revisits an event that grabbed
- [The Root of a Person](https://chapter16.org/the-root-of-a-person/) - In Light to the Hills, the lovely debut novel from Murfreesboro resident Bonnie Blaylock, the time is 1936 and the place is the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. Twenty-one-year-old Amanda Rye has been hired as a rider for the Packhorse Library Program, a Works Progress Administration project designed to bring books and other printed materials
- [A Lifelong Task](https://chapter16.org/a-lifelong-task/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on January 23, 2012. *** In her widely acclaimed 1986 book, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, Alicia Ostriker observed that every literary movement “has its roots in a past which it at once perpetuates, repudiates, and transforms.” The same might be
- [Overtime](https://chapter16.org/overtime/) - Saturday, 10 a.m. I am at the Birdhouse, an old Victorian home in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood that has been repurposed as a community meeting space, and I am tearing open a mesh bag of Cuties. I arrange the clementines on the table next to the store-bought croissants and juice boxes; this has now
- [Wounded Eagle](https://chapter16.org/wounded-eagle/) - Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, By America, has been interested since childhood in the complexities of poverty, what keeps people poor, and the miserable entrapments that accompany this condition for those who have never known economic security. The son of a small-town Arizona pastor, Desmond never had to wonder where his next meal
- [A Prize-Winning "Start"](https://chapter16.org/a-prize-winning-start/) - We won’t condescend to Elizabeth Spencer by counting her age (which is ninety-two) as the most extraordinary element of her recent productivity. Any working writer of any age would live for years like the one Spencer is having, which includes a prestigious award and a critically acclaimed new collection of stories, slyly titled Starting Over.
- [Landscapes of Her Heart](https://chapter16.org/landscapes-of-her-heart/) - It’s hard to know where to begin to catalogue the literary achievements of Elizabeth Spencer. In a career than spans more than sixty years, the Mississippi native has published nine novels, seven story collections, a memoir, and a play. Her work has garnered critical acclaim and a passel of honors and awards, including the prestigious
- [The Cost of a Thing](https://chapter16.org/the-cost-of-a-thing/) - I think I may be allergic to mottoes. The idea that you can boil life down to a bumper-sticker philosophy seems childish to me. And I think people who try to squeeze themselves into a labeled philosophy look as if their underwear is too tight. Although now and then I read a line that truly
- [Elegance of Fancy](https://chapter16.org/elegance-of-fancy/) - On the twenty-third of February 1917, the year the United States joined the fighting in Europe, Robert N. Jones received a book as a gift. It was a copy of a five-year-old volume titled Charles Dickens as Editor and bearing an Edwardian subtitle: “Being Letters Written by Him to William Henry Wills, His Sub-Editor.” A
- [Dark Lantern](https://chapter16.org/dark-lantern/) - Past the thrift-shop racks of musty shirts and jeans, beyond a junkyard of orphaned kitchen utensils, I was prowling the few shelves of books, hoping for treasure at a dollar a book. It was the day before Halloween 1993 at the Nashville Goodwill store. Nearby, two college-age women who looked as if they had been
- [“Daffodils”](https://chapter16.org/daffodils/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on February 21, 2014. *** Former Knoxvillian Tom Lombardo is a poet, essayist, and freelance medical writer who lives in Midtown Atlanta. His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Ambit, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and New York Quarterly, among others. He is the editor of an
- [Where We Labor](https://chapter16.org/where-we-labor/) - “Oppression is never abstract,” editors Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones write in their introduction to What Things Cost: an anthology for the people. “It is in the detail of human living where we labor, be it joyful or tiring. Or both.” What Things Cost is a landmark collection of writing dedicated to such
- [Mythbusters](https://chapter16.org/mythbusters/) - History matters. When we tell the story of the past, we are also explaining ourselves — our challenges, our values, our politics. Naturally, we often disagree about the meaning of the historical evidence before us. But these days, as the center of American politics keeps eroding, the battles over history are getting nastier. With Myth
- [Meet Me Deep in This Mystery](https://chapter16.org/meet-me-deep-in-this-mystery/) - Katherine Smith’s Secret City Early in Secret City, a mother considers how well she has prepared her daughter for life beyond maternal protection: “You hope you taught her well enough / how to read the book of the world,” Smith writes, “and not be haunted by its strangeness.” A Tennessee native who studied at UT
- [Randall Kenan Could Fly](https://chapter16.org/randall-kenan-could-fly/) - Far too often, the Black queer canon is said to begin and end with James Baldwin. More than a few miss out on the Black gay writers for whom Baldwin was both friend and foreigner. Randall Kenan is a timely example of such a writer. In his posthumous collection of essays, Black Folk Could Fly,
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- [The Past Rising Up](https://chapter16.org/the-past-rising-up/) - In Randall Kenan’s new story collection, If I Had Two Wings, men and women often find themselves in bewildering circumstances, caught up in twists of fate that demand a new action or unrehearsed response. Sometimes these characters are able to trace a line from their pasts to these strange, exciting moments. Sometimes the trajectory is
- [The Keys to a Better Life](https://chapter16.org/the-keys-to-a-better-life/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This article originally appeared on April 5, 2021. *** While researching his book, A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed America, Georgia-based photographer Andrew Feiler traveled 25,000 miles across 15 states to explore the remnants of “Rosenwald Schools,” one of
- [She Loved Baseball](https://chapter16.org/she-loved-baseball/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on January 5, 2021. It has been updated with new publication details. *** In 2006, Effa Manley was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and is still the only woman so honored. This would not have surprised her. As the co-owner and manager of
- [A Disaster and a Dauntless Town](https://chapter16.org/a-disaster-and-a-dauntless-town/) - It’s a tragedy with a title: The Waverly Train Disaster. In its wake, the United States remade its emergency response and zeroed in on rail safety, but the story of heroes, martyrs, and human triumph over catastrophe in the Middle Tennessee town of 4,000 had been left behind. In Walk Through Fire, Dr. Yasmine S.
- [One Mississippi, Two](https://chapter16.org/one-mississippi-two/) - Thirty-six hours after my client was executed, I drove along the highway in the direction opposite the prison for my wisdom teeth extraction. The throb ballooning at the back of my gums had become a rhythmic, welcome distraction from the grief scratching my throat ragged. I ground my back teeth together as I looked out
- [Pack Man](https://chapter16.org/pack-man/) - In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed legislation that allowed him to appoint one justice to the Supreme Court for every sitting judge over age 70. This “court-packing” plan met stiff opposition. Senator Burton Wheeler objected that, if the law was enacted, the Constitution would become “as ductile as a gob of chewing gum.” In
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- [A March to the Mountaintop](https://chapter16.org/a-march-to-the-mountaintop/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on August 23, 2018. *** Ten years ago, librarian and writer Alice Faye Duncan went to the shelves to find a children's book on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. for a talk she was preparing. There was no such book. In fact, there were
- [American Carnage](https://chapter16.org/american-carnage/) - President Donald Trump has inspired great outrage among American liberals, as well as impassioned defenses from his core supporters. In Trump’s First Year, Michael Nelson, a distinguished conservative expert on the presidency, takes neither approach, offering dispassionate but trenchant critiques of Trump’s leadership during his first year in office. A former editor at Washington Monthly
- [Heartbreak and Betrayal](https://chapter16.org/heartbreak-and-betrayal/) - Nashville author J.T. Ellison has written her most personal and deeply moving novel with It’s One of Us but, like the master storyteller she is, still manages to weave a heart-pounding mystery thriller for her legion of readers. Ellison immediately evokes sympathy for her main character, home designer Olivia Bender, who loses yet another pregnancy
- [Overcoming the Divide](https://chapter16.org/overcoming-the-divide/) - In his 2009 book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark urged his readers to “submit everything we’re up to, at work and at play, to the discipline of sacred questioning.” He’s taken that advice to heart in his subsequent books, and now he’s carried the interrogation process a step further by revisiting 2016’s Life’s
- [Let This Homeplace Speak](https://chapter16.org/let-this-homeplace-speak/) - Richard Tillinghast is a patient poet. He wades into the water — or the night — and waits to be forgotten. What can be understood in such stillness? Now writing in his 80s, it’s tempting to think of this superpower as something that comes with age, but it seems more like a natural-born trait. His
- [A Masterful, Lyrical Satire](https://chapter16.org/a-masterful-lyrical-satire/) - In Richard Bausch’s latest novel, Playhouse, a Memphis theater company stages a performance of King Lear to celebrate a high-profile relaunch. As rehearsals begin, celebrities sign on, and with the revitalized Globe Theater positioned as a beacon of cultured Memphis, the characters struggle to find harmony, let alone pull off the play. A masterful, lyrical
- [L.A. Roots](https://chapter16.org/l-a-roots/) - It’s fitting that Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock, companion book to a major, multi-year exhibition at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, is album-shaped. Just looking at the cover puts a song in your head. Maybe it’s something off the Byrds’ 1968 landmark album Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
- [Ties That Bind](https://chapter16.org/ties-that-bind/) - Now an accomplished surgeon and teacher, Abraham Verghese was born and educated in Ethiopia but served his medical residency in Johnson City, Tennessee, from 1980 to 1983. After a fellowship at Boston University, Verghese returned to Johnson City to care for AIDS patients—an experience he later wrote about in his first book, My Own Country.
- [Alexander van der Pool](https://chapter16.org/alexander-van-der-pool/) - Alexander van der Pool awoke like a man crawling out of a deep, dark hole. He yawned, stretched, rubbed crusts of sleep from his eyes, and flipped off the radio that crackled with more static than jazz. The weather had changed since he’d been holed up in his sister’s spare bedroom in Stovall, the middle
- [Ball of Fire](https://chapter16.org/ball-of-fire/) - FEBRUARY 24, 1978 FRIDAY 2:55 P.M. The whole world had turned upside down. Police Sergeant Elton “Toad” Smith looked up to see what had struck him on the forehead. What he saw made his blood run cold in spite of the sudden, searing heat. It seemed as if the entire railbed had been hurled into
- [Pursuing the Stranger Course](https://chapter16.org/pursuing-the-stranger-course/) - During the past year, Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White has seen three books published — a feat that would be a high point for any writer’s career. First, his harrowing memoir-in-essays, A Year Without Months, arrived, giving readers a forthright yet graceful account of his survival amid several deaths by suicide among the men in
- [Brownsville](https://chapter16.org/brownsville/) - “I hope you won’t have any problem taking a drug test, will you?” the Brownsville Herald’s editor-in-chief asked me over the phone. “We require all our new hires to pass one.” It was 1994, and she was actually offering me a copy-editing job in the Texas border town, after I had sent out nearly 100
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- [Speaking Ida's Truth for a New Generation](https://chapter16.org/speaking-idas-truth-for-a-new-generation/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The article originally appeared on February 10, 2022. *** The work of activist, author, and educator Michelle Duster, as she likes to describe it, is to "unerase Black women." Ida B. Wells, Voice of Truth, her new book, does just that. This picture book biography profiles the life and work
- [The Quiet General](https://chapter16.org/the-quiet-general/) - When reports of the capture of Confederate Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River were published in February 1862, the Northern press, desperate for good news from the front, hyped the success of the relatively unknown brigadier general responsible for the victory. Ulysses S. Grant’s name was often shortened in print to U.S. Grant, inviting speculation
- [More of a Burden Than a Gift](https://chapter16.org/more-of-a-burden-than-a-gift/) - In the title story of Lisa Cupolo’s debut story collection, she writes, “Before he died, her father said, ‘Now that you have a child, Ali, you will never be free again.’ How true that was. Family history revolves in a circle, she thought, spinning and repeating itself until the end of time.” The pain of
- [Rage Against the Sexy Gym](https://chapter16.org/rage-against-the-sexy-gym/) - It was the summer of 2009, before brightly colored cycle studios took over the world. Before music-thumping, trendy gyms sold their brand of youth, hustle, and sex appeal to the masses. Before athleisure was a word. At the time, my sister was a certified CrossFit instructor, and she’d text me a WOD (workout-of-the-day) for free.
- [Meeting the Blues](https://chapter16.org/meeting-the-blues/) - David Evans was a Harvard graduate who loved the blues. He was particularly fascinated with Tommy Johnson, an early Mississippi master of the form known for a spooky falsetto and his dark ode to Sterno drinking, “Canned Heat Blues.” Marina Bokelman was offered a Fulbright scholarship but turned it down to enter UCLA’s new folklore
- [Much Ado About Something](https://chapter16.org/much-ado-about-something/) - Percival Everett’s Dr. No is much ado about nothing. But in this novel, his 23rd, Everett explores the idea that perhaps nothing is something. Or everything. Everett’s recent novels include Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), So Much Blue (2017), and Telephone, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. The
- [“A Warm Day in Winter”](https://chapter16.org/a-warm-day-in-winter/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on March 1, 2013. *** A Warm Day in Winter The leash looped around my wrist, we stop to let the dog piss across a trunk— the branches stark this late in winter, though everyone is out, spreading blankets on the grass, eating with plastic forks.
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- [Come Fly with Me](https://chapter16.org/come-fly-with-me/) - It’s tough to dislike a mystery novel that pulls the reader in with the promise of a psychic travel agent who may or may not be able to help solve crime. If that’s not enough of a lure, the first chapter of Cherie Priest’s Flight Risk features a missing dog named Cairo who is found
- [Time to Grow Up](https://chapter16.org/time-to-grow-up/) - Claire Gibson’s Beyond the Point begins as a conventional campus novel in which college students discover their identities through intellectual journeys and romantic missteps. Three elements distinguish this novel, Gibson’s debut, from that recognizable genre. First, the college in question is the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, so keg parties and all-night bong sessions
- [All It Took Was an Invitation](https://chapter16.org/all-it-took-was-an-invitation/) - The course of her fate had changed last fall, when a thin brunette woman arrived at the Centennial High School gymnasium. Though she hid in the shadows, the woman’s tall and thin silhouette was the picture of pure authority. Her dark hair was sliced with streaks of silver and cut short for easy maintenance. Close-set
- [Back to West Texas](https://chapter16.org/back-to-west-texas/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on April 21, 2020. *** Your summer vacation dream involved the ocean, a beach chair, and a book. And, well, now your beach plans are on pause. But your elementary school librarian was right — in a good summer read, you can still travel anywhere. Let’s
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- [UPDATE: Announcing the Humanities Tennessee Fellowship in Criticism](https://chapter16.org/announcing-the-humanities-tennessee-fellowship-in-criticism/) - January 3, 2023: We're pleased to announce that Kashif Andrew Graham has been awarded the Humanities Tennessee Fellowship in Criticism for 2023. A freelance writer and librarian, Kashif is a frequent contributor to Nashville Scene, Chapter 16, Theological Librarianship, and other literary outlets. He has also appeared on C-SPAN, Queerology, and WPLN's This is
- [A Tennessee Memory of Sidney Poitier](https://chapter16.org/a-tennessee-memory-of-sidney-poitier/) - January 6, 2022, was a day of multilayered sadness. Not only was it the first anniversary of an insurrection — the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol — it was also the day Sidney Poitier died. With this passing of an American icon, my friend Hugh Moore shared a treasure I had forgotten — an
- ["Statues in the Park"](https://chapter16.org/statues-in-the-park/) - Statues in the Park Toward the end of the day & wishing again for daylight. What’s discernible is evening’s impending gloom. If we’d admit it, this is a sad occasion: us perched at separate ends of a park bench; block-headed statues in the dark looming behind us holding so dearly to one another. This is
- [Front-Row Seat to the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll](https://chapter16.org/front-row-seat-to-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/) - The stories and photos are almost as good as the music they document in the handsome new book The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Illustrated Story of Sun Records and the 70 Recordings That Changed the World, written by Peter Guralnick and Colin Escott. Jerry Lee Lewis, who died shortly before the book’s release
- [Merry Christmas! You’ve Got Cactus Man](https://chapter16.org/merry-christmas-youve-got-cactus-man/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on December 17, 2019. *** He appeared at my threshold late one night, uninvited: a hideous ceramic figure in biker regalia, about a foot tall — not that size mattered. What did matter was his most outstanding anatomical feature: a long, skinny cactus reaching skyward from
- [Still Alive](https://chapter16.org/still-alive/) - Back in her San Francisco bartending days, Rachel Kushner witnessed life in a way many of us never will. One night at the Warfield, a historic music venue, the Rolling Stones threw a party for their crew, and Kushner slung cocktails alongside Keith Richards. At a Tenderloin dive, one of her regulars was murdered, his
- [Making It in Music City](https://chapter16.org/making-it-in-music-city-2/) - In Maybe We’ll Make It, Margo Price delivers an unflinching self-portrait of an artist striving to find her sound and make her Music City dreams come true. Price moved to Nashville from Illinois in 2003, when she was 20 years old. Back then, in those pre-gentrified days, the city was grittier yet still a musician’s
- [Especially at Christmastime](https://chapter16.org/especially-at-christmastime/) - My Aunt Ruby was an excellent cook. And it became her tradition to come to our house on Christmas Eve to help my mother prepare turkey dressing for our dinner the next day. My mother and her older sister enjoyed their holiday time together, cooking, catching up, and reminiscing. On December 24, 1971, Ruby and
- [Thinking of Home](https://chapter16.org/thinking-of-home/) - We came there in the spring of 1963. Our house stood alone in the newly subdivided farmlands south of Nashville. Its only companions were scattered foundations representing the future homes of families whose lives we would share for years. At first, there were no front steps. We got in by crossing on a long, bouncy
- [Emotional Truths And Gonzo Premises](https://chapter16.org/emotional-truths-and-gonzo-premises/) - The characters in Kevin Wilson’s debut story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, experience emotions that almost any reader would find both soothingly and troublingly familiar. They are men and women alone in the world, either by choice or unfortunate circumstance, and they are keenly aware of loss—that of parents, innocence, friendship. They
- [One Night in Beijing](https://chapter16.org/one-night-in-beijing/) - Speeding along in a taxi on a busy Saturday night, I felt giddy as I drank in the unfamiliar sights of Beijing: parks full of enthusiastic dancers moving in rhythm, groups of three or four atop small motorcycles weaving through the traffic, a nonstop array of neon signs. I was in total bliss except for
- [Singing the Portuguese Blues](https://chapter16.org/singing-the-portuguese-blues/) - In Portugal, ceramic swallows nearly outnumber the gooseneck barnacles that are sold in cafes and pubs. The glazed birds pop up on doorsteps, city walls, and homes. This bright morning in Porto, I notice yet another black-winged swallow adorning the exterior of a jewelry shop in the Bairro da Se old quarter. Inside, the proprietor
- [Daylight till Dark](https://chapter16.org/daylight-till-dark/) - My father never cared for vegetable gardening. He loved his fruit trees — Red Delicious, Arkansas Black, and Granny Smith apples; Elberta peaches; and Bartlett pears — that he ordered from Stark Bro’s catalog and planted in the field below our house and in our backyard. With my older brother Butch's help, he pruned dead
- [With Bears in Winter](https://chapter16.org/with-bears-in-winter/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on February 1, 2019. *** Back in the 1980s, while I was a member of the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, my wife Anne and I were allowed to take part in a black-bear research study in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The project was
- [“We Love Those Among Whom We Have Spent the Day”](https://chapter16.org/we-love-those-among-whom-we-have-spent-the-day/) - We Love Those Among Whom We Have Spent the Day At the Starbucks at twilight, a stranger, young enough to be my son, leans over the counter clicking on buttons, his cropped head inches from my mouth while he enters Windows, taps another button, pulls up the internet, then praises the photo of my cat
- [Fans Take to the Roadshow](https://chapter16.org/fans-take-to-the-roadshow/) - Fame was so close. I could smell it. I could taste it. Oh, no, not that kind of fame. You’ll never catch me dancing on TikTok or “influencing” millions with culinary wizardry or cat videos. My shot at glory seemed much closer to my grasp and certainly more age-appropriate. I longed to be on Antiques
- [“Sleeping Over on Highway 78”](https://chapter16.org/sleeping-over-on-highway-78/) - Sleeping Over on Highway 78 for Richard Wooten Thirty miles to the small town of Red Banks, The phosphor-lit dial of your Opel Kadett’s Dashboard clock ticking out ten after ten, A light rain intermittently stippling The windshield with petti-tricolor drops Smudged the next instant by the wipers’ Metronomic sway and rock, our Antenna homing
- [A Sacred Whole](https://chapter16.org/a-sacred-whole/) - Whenever believers and atheists start sniping at each other, someone—usually a would-be peacemaker—will eventually pipe up to declare that everybody has a religion of some sort. We all hold something sacred, this argument goes, even if it’s only the right to hold nothing sacred. This observation, while true enough, doesn’t by itself accomplish much in
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- [Fall Diptych](https://chapter16.org/fall-diptych/) - My body, the portrait I show the world—soft tissue, muscle, bone large and small, also my knobby scaffold—kneecap, knuckle, elbow—the elbow that lets me stand akimbo, a word not used much anymore. That lets my torso open and fold, winglike. The machinery of dailiness I believe will remain upright, until weeding in late August, a
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- [Out of the Shadows of History](https://chapter16.org/out-of-the-shadows-of-history/) - Daniel Boone was a bold frontiersman, a superhero in buckskin. We all know that story. But Knoxville author Patricia L. Hudson tells the flipside tale in the fine novel Traces. You know the history. Now immerse yourself in her story. Traces centers on Rebecca Boone, Daniel’s wife of 56 years, and their oldest daughters, Susannah
- ["Weapons, or What I Have Taken in My Hand to Speak When I Have No Words"](https://chapter16.org/weapons-or-what-i-have-taken-in-my-hand-to-speak-when-i-have-no-words/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on December 9, 2019 *** Weapons, or What I Have Taken in My Hand to Speak When I Have No Words (inspired by T.C. Cannon’s images) BLACK — Before there was anything else possible. We settled there, not far from the river, at the
- [On Modern Farming](https://chapter16.org/on-modern-farming/) - Arwen Donahue married a farmer, David, and spent the past 20 years living on a farm in Kentucky, growing produce to sell to local markets and raising their daughter, Phoebe. In Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year, Donahue creates 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings and pairs them with short reflections for each day, providing an intimate glimpse
- [Souled Out](https://chapter16.org/souled-out/) - Every year, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis bestows an award for the nonfiction book, published in the previous year, that best furthers understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy. The 2021 winner is Thomas Healy’s Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of
- [How You’ll Remember You Were Made from Her](https://chapter16.org/how-youll-remember-you-were-made-from-her/) - Life cycles of all kinds recur throughout poet Sara Moore Wagner’s new collection, Hillbilly Madonna. Cycles of life and death, or near-death and rebirth. The harrowing repetitions of addiction. Abuse and remorse. Ensnarement and escape. Everywhere in these poems, familial patterns assert themselves and make their influence known, evoking traumas both personal and generational. Many
- [The Rainbow Connection](https://chapter16.org/the-rainbow-connection/) - In Rainbow Rainbow, a collection of 10 stories depicting trans and queer experiences, writer Lydia Conklin deftly portrays people and relationships, revealing how both survive the despair and joy of change, whether that’s figuring out exactly what it means to transition or the difficulties of coming out to a partner. The collection is the debut
- [Power to Harm and to Heal](https://chapter16.org/power-to-harm-and-to-heal/) - Whether he’s covering Dave Ramsey, Beth Moore, Southern Baptists, or snake handlers, Bob Smietana knows how to narrate the cult in the word culture. This is to say he’s a religion reporter. Formerly the religion writer for The Tennessean and a senior editor of Christianity Today, he is currently a national reporter for Religion News
- [Flight to Balad](https://chapter16.org/flight-to-balad/) - Sometime during the night, the generator ran out of gas. Cold waking hours revived memories of winter mornings at my grandparents’ house in the country. The fireplace never lasted through the night. It was a certain type of cold — penetrating, humbling, and difficult. It was the kind of cold that made you feel poor.
- [Rye Wit](https://chapter16.org/rye-wit/) - From Old Monongahela, the generic name for the spirit that dominated American tastes in the 19th century, through the distinct styles of Kentucky, Maryland, and the myriad expressions of the latest micro-distilleries, Clay Risen explores all things rye in American Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Original Spirit. This is his third book in a series that
- [True Feeling, Not Magic](https://chapter16.org/true-feeling-not-magic/) - From the first moment that we heard Louise Erdrich’s voice, we knew we had discovered a unique talent – more than that, a portal to a new world. Love Medicine introduced Erdrich’s literary landscape, the North Dakota of the Ojibwe tribe and neighboring regions, populated by a broad cast of lovers and fighters, ne’er-do-wells and
- [Unfixable Beauty](https://chapter16.org/unfixable-beauty/) - Bestselling author, poet, and professor Ross Gay is a devotee of the wild and wondrous elements that grow in the garden or the classroom and surprise us in poetry or community. His latest book, Inciting Joy, is organized around 14 reflections he calls “incitements,” with topics like accompanying a dying father, planting an orchard, playing
- [Where the Badness Lives](https://chapter16.org/where-the-badness-lives/) - In “Harold, Protector of the Children,” a chilling story from Rebecca Bernard’s debut collection, Our Sister Who Will Not Die, the protagonist is a young man who appears unassuming and gentle. But inside, he does battle with troubling desires. One tactic he uses to bridle these harmful impulses is to locate and watch the homes
- [Vibrating with the Possibility of What You Might Become](https://chapter16.org/vibrating-with-the-possibility-of-what-you-might-become/) - We were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture,” admits Frankie, the protagonist and narrator of Sewanee author Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic. In the summer of 1996, 16-year-old Frankie meets Zeke, who is new to their small town of Coalfield, Tennessee. The two misfits
- [Life of Two](https://chapter16.org/life-of-two/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on October 13, 2021. It has been updated with new publication details. *** In a recent essay for the New York Times Book Review, the author Jonathan Lee argued that historical fiction, like other loosely defined genres, has chipped away ingrained notions of what literature should
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- [The Leiper's Fork Way](https://chapter16.org/the-leipers-fork-way/) - “Damn,” said Anne, rising from the dinner table. “What is it?” I said. “Blue’s out.” And, sure enough, I looked out the back window and there was Vida Blue greedily grazing in the tall grass of the back pasture, followed by Junebug and Sundown in a row. Blue was supposed to be dry-lotted behind the
- [Brushing the Divine](https://chapter16.org/brushing-the-divine/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on April 6, 2015. *** I first visited Historic Rugby last September, when I was invited to read from my second novel, Long Man, as part of their annual writer series. From the moment I stepped out of the car I was bewitched by this Gothic
- [Secrets and Questions](https://chapter16.org/secrets-and-questions/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on February 9, 2022. *** Knoxville author Julia Watts, known for her writing on LGBTQ+ characters living in the Bible Belt, adds a fresh voice with her latest novel Needlework. Sixteen-year-old Kody must navigate caring for his drug-addicted mother and avoid upsetting his grandmother, Nanny, all
- [Scared Yet?](https://chapter16.org/scared-yet/) - Never mind Hollywood reboots of Halloween, Scream, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: If you want true classic terror, read Michael Bess’ Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them. The Vanderbilt historian and professor in communication of science and technology dives deeply into four familiar forms of global mayhem, providing
- [Turning Something Awful into Something Good](https://chapter16.org/turning-something-awful-into-something-good/) - In book after book, Kristin O’Donnell Tubb has proven herself a master at creating charming characters with real problems who draw readers in from the very first page. Whether the setting is the New York Public Library in the early 20th century or the world of a modern service dog — described from the point
- [Of Blood and Darkness](https://chapter16.org/of-blood-and-darkness/) - Sixteen years have passed since Cormac McCarthy published The Road, which won a Pulitzer, became an international bestseller, and further cemented his reputation as one of the major writers of his generation. Given that he was 73 then, the question of whether he would ever publish another novel has long been the subject of rumor
- [Flowers Blooming in a Blizzard](https://chapter16.org/flowers-blooming-in-a-blizzard/) - In one of the 50 vignettes that make up Catching the Light, Joy Harjo tells of receiving an image via Facebook Messenger from an old friend in Lukachukai, a mountainous area of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. The friend describes the scene around him — mesa views and sound of his sister’s old truck revving
- [A Story of Women and Power](https://chapter16.org/a-story-of-women-and-power/) - The story of the occult is largely the story of women and power. Pick any era, pick your practice — Wicca, tarot, astrology, and magical herbalism, among others — and you’ll find women at the center of the narrative, blazing their own paths, finding their followers, and carving out spheres of considerable influence, patriarchy be
- [How Right Made Might](https://chapter16.org/how-right-made-might/) - Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham has set a high bar for himself in penning yet another biography of one of the most written-about personalities in human history. Most American readers believe they already know Lincoln, who maintains his longstanding dominance in virtually any list of the greatest American presidents. But in his new book, And
- [Seeing Through the Fog](https://chapter16.org/seeing-through-the-fog/) - Erica Waters returns to her theme of portraying horror in the South — featured in her previous two novels Ghost Wood Song and The River Has Teeth — in her latest YA thriller The Restless Dark. In the rough mountain wilderness of Cloudkiss Canyon, die-hard fans of the true-crime podcast “Human Beasties” gather for a
- [Fertile Ground for Art](https://chapter16.org/fertile-ground-for-art/) - It’s said that to travel outward is to equally travel inward. This adage rings true in Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere: An Artist Explores the Nature of Virginia as we accompany her across the varied topography and history of the state. From 2011–2013, Stryk, who received a Master of Arts degree from East Tennessee
- [Portrait of the Artists](https://chapter16.org/portrait-of-the-artists/) - In her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun grapples with numerous legacies at once, each one proving elusive and irresistible. When she undertakes the task of completing a literary biography of Frank O’Hara — a project that had stumped her art critic father decades earlier — Calhoun engages complex,
- [Saving Magic](https://chapter16.org/saving-magic/) - Megan Giddings’ 2020 debut novel, Lakewood, explored class and race through a medical horror story. Her second, The Women Could Fly, employs dystopia and fantasy to examine the most pressing issues that curb women’s autonomy, not least of which are racism and state-sanctioned misogyny. In Giddings’ modern-day U.S., all women must be under the legal
- [We’re Back, Baby!](https://chapter16.org/were-back-baby/) - I’ll never forget my first visit to the Southern Festival of Books in 2013. I was freshly divorced and nervous as a cat, with the self-esteem of a garden slug. Despite all this, I had a fantastic time. I attended interesting talks, met a bunch of cool authors, and even made some new friends. By
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- [What's Most Sacred](https://chapter16.org/whats-most-sacred/) - In Over My Dead Body, author Greg Melville leads readers on a fascinating journey through time by means of the burial grounds and death practices of the United States from colonial Jamestown to the present day. A decorated Navy veteran who teaches writing and literature at the United States Naval Academy, Melville spent a summer
- [Candlelit Suspense](https://chapter16.org/candlelit-suspense/) - A sharp feel for textures — brocaded fabrics, sumptuous dinners, jeweled pendants, a slant of Tuscan light — casts a cinematic sheen over Maggie O’Farrell’s gripping, beautiful new novel, The Marriage Portrait, set in the waning days of the Italian Renaissance. The author of acclaimed works such as I Am, I Am, I Am and
- [A Bit of a Renaissance](https://chapter16.org/a-bit-of-a-renaissance/) - Tom Perrotta has a knack for timeliness. His best-known novels (and their film versions)—1998’s Election, 2004’s Little Children, and 2011’s The Leftovers—project hot-button issues and buzzy cultural themes onto a backdrop of evergreen domestic concerns. Whether he’s dissecting student-teacher power games, riffing on overinvolved parenting, or taking inspiration from an actual doomsday cult, his books
- [The First Novel](https://chapter16.org/the-first-novel/) - The narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s dazzling new novel, The Hero of This Book, is a middle-aged author whose name is never revealed. “Writers are dull,” she confesses. “I find myself intolerable, the author of these sentences, which means I am writing a book about a writer.” The writing of the story comes to dominate the
- [Rolling Back History](https://chapter16.org/rolling-back-history/) - Becca Andrews grew up in a conservative West Tennessee town and graduated in 2013 from Middle Tennessee State University, where she was my student. She then moved to California, where she earned a master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 2015 and worked for seven years on the staff of Mother Jones magazine. Her
- [Less than Total Recall](https://chapter16.org/less-than-total-recall/) - In Julian R. Vaca’s debut novel, The Memory Index, the year is 1987 and the world is an alternate reality where an incurable disease called Memory Killer has led to dependence on a device for artificial recall. A recently orphaned young woman, Freya Izquierdo, is out to uncover the mystery behind her father’s sudden death,
- [Your Brain on Music](https://chapter16.org/your-brain-on-music/) - Most of us love music, but Richard Manning is on a mission to explain why in his latest book, If It Sounds Good, It Is Good. Manning is a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and was a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University. He writes mostly about environmental issues, but he’s also
- [Stuck to the Bones](https://chapter16.org/stuck-to-the-bones/) - The Jim Crow era in the United States South involved more than segregation laws and disfranchised voters. As Margaret A. Burnham compellingly demonstrates in By Hands Now Known, Jim Crow was a system reinforced and defined by violence. Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Burnham has written a fine-grained history of racial homicides
- [Sitting in the Memories](https://chapter16.org/sitting-in-the-memories/) - Fruit Punch opens with a caveat from author Kendra Allen that you should put the book down if it gets too heavy for you. Allen writes, “I know we tend to use words like trigger and trauma loosely, but you know what you know and what you feel, so when you know what it is
- [A Planet and Stars Align for Memphis Teens in Love](https://chapter16.org/a-planet-and-stars-align-for-memphis-teens-in-love/) - Kelis Rowe says she was on a mission to “give young readers a story about Black teens falling in love” when she wrote her debut novel Finding Jupiter, set in Memphis. In a video on her website, Rowe says her story specifically focuses on young people “living while Black and not experiencing Black trauma.” There
- [Bringing People into the Room](https://chapter16.org/bringing-people-into-the-room/) - Francesca Royster opens Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions with a recollection of attending a Chicago country music and barbecue festival in 2014. At one point, her heart “gave a lurch” when she recognized the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Hearing the anthem of defiant white Southern nostalgia, she writes, “reminded me of
- [Sunset of the American Century](https://chapter16.org/sunset-of-the-american-century/) - At first glance, the two novellas that comprise Victoria Shorr’s Mid-Air appear to depict families heading in opposite directions: a patrician New York family fading into obscurity and an immigrant clan rising from the working class to wealth and prominence. As Shorr demonstrates, though, families are complex systems that don’t fit neatly into conventional narratives
- [The Bucket List](https://chapter16.org/the-bucket-list/) - When Horse’s Breath General Hospital suddenly closes, Dr. Yungman Kwak doesn’t know what to do next. Dr. Kwak, the protagonist of Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s The Evening Hero, has been the only obstetrics specialist in his region of northern Minnesota for decades, and he’s ill-equipped to occupy his newfound leisure. He doesn’t golf or fish, doesn’t
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- [We, the Swimmers](https://chapter16.org/we-the-swimmers/) - From the first page, Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, teaches readers how to read this book. We start with a simple, omniscient description of the pool — “located deep underground” — but the narrator quickly shifts to the first-person plural perspective, with the use of “we” and “us” to represent a group of amateur
- [When It All Falls Down](https://chapter16.org/when-it-all-falls-down/) - Toya Wolfe pens a tribute to the public housing project where she grew up in her outstanding debut, Last Summer on State Street. Through the eyes of 12-year-old Fe Fe, we bear witness to the realities of Chicago’s infamous Robert Taylor Homes in this heartfelt coming-of-age novel. Completed in the 1960s, the Robert Taylor Homes
- [Crisis Management](https://chapter16.org/crisis-management/) - There’s a phrase that Dr. Alex Jahangir repeats consistently throughout his memoir, Hot Spot: “All bleeding stops.” It’s a saying he first employed when treating dangerously ill patients as an orthopedic trauma surgeon and later as a public health leader during the pandemic. The book follows his quest to stop the bleeding — or, in
- [Humanities Tennessee Announces Lineup for the 34th Annual Southern Festival of Books](https://chapter16.org/humanities-tennessee-announces-lineup-for-the-34th-annual-southern-festival-of-books/) - UPDATE: A current list of all participating authors can be found here. For all Chapter16's festival coverage, go here. *** Humanities Tennessee today announced the initial lineup of award-winning, bestselling authors who will headline the 34th Annual Southern Festival of Books, taking place at War Memorial Plaza and the Nashville Public Library’s main branch on
- [Big River](https://chapter16.org/big-river/) - When Rinker Buck, the Tennessee-based author of Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure, told his brother that he planned to build a flatboat and float it down the Ohio River from West Virginia to the Mississippi and then on to New Orleans, the seasoned Coast Guard veteran replied, “Rinker … you’re going to
- [Toward Justice](https://chapter16.org/toward-justice/) - Injustice isn’t an accident. As Nashville-based psychologist and author Christina Edmondson once observed, “Decisions create culture.” That three-word aphorism, applied personally and publicly, can go a long way toward getting a fix on fate, even arresting — and possibly reversing — the sinking feeling of the inevitable. If decisions create culture, perhaps what is isn’t
- [The Displaced](https://chapter16.org/the-displaced/) - Nashville-based author and translator Adria Bernardi is nothing if not prolific. Her prior publications include an oral history, a book of literary essays, a short story collection, and two novels, as well as eight translations from Italian into English. Her just-released third novel, Benefit Street, is a lyrical tale of exile. Narrated by a woman
- [The Third Pillar of the Community](https://chapter16.org/the-third-pillar-of-the-community/) - In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, African American communities all over the country established fraternal and benevolent organizations. Some, such as the Prince Hall Masons, paralleled white organizations from which people of color were generally excluded. Others, like the United Sons of Ham, originated within the African American community. These organizations, or “lodges,”
- [Hanging with the Dead](https://chapter16.org/hanging-with-the-dead/) - “In St. Hilaire, New York, everyone talked to the dead,” explains teenage medium Russ Griffin. “If you were lucky or talented, or both, the dead might listen. Sometimes they talked back. Sometimes they made sense. Sometimes they were just a pain in the ass.” With The Promise of Lost Things, Nashville writer Helene Dunbar adds
- [A Single Drop of Blood](https://chapter16.org/a-single-drop-of-blood/) - “You can bury a secret in a shallow grave,” muses 18-year-old Nyla in We Were Kings, the latest YA novel from Court Stevens. “A deep grave might make you crazy, but a shallow grave is a survival tool. Dig a few inches, toss in the pain, and shovel the dirt over the top. Go on
- [Man of Steel](https://chapter16.org/man-of-steel/) - Early in Buddy Emmons: Steel Guitar Icon, Steve Fishell’s deft and lively biography, we meet the future legend as a skinny, high school-hating, 14-year-old boy on his bike, hanging around outside a bar, fascinated by what’s taking place inside. “As the club door swung open,” Fishell writes, “he ignored the loud barroom crowd, the thick
- [When Home Is a Place You’ve Fled](https://chapter16.org/when-home-is-a-place-youve-fled/) - Home from college on Easter Sunday in 2002, journalist Casey Parks first found courage to come out as gay to her rural Louisiana family, unleashing a torrent of panicked judgment from her mother. With one blast of tough-minded reason, her grandmother intervened. Later, she pulled Parks aside to share a childhood memory that had never
- [“Molly in a Red Wig Plays a Fiddle”](https://chapter16.org/molly-in-a-red-wig-plays-a-fiddle/) - Molly in a Red Wig Plays a Fiddle Molly asks me take the hanging guitar held suspended from its two-prong hook screwed to the wall. The guitar is her brother’s, custom-made in Viet Nam, a body brown as roux; its head and neck completely filigreed with inlayed nacre. Hank is working as a lawyer in
- [The Spirit of ‘76](https://chapter16.org/the-spirit-of-76/) - The title of Andrew Maraniss’ latest book, Inaugural Ballers, with its internal rhyme and fine balance of formal language and street argot, neatly captures the book’s two predominant narrative threads. Subtitled The True Story of the First US Women’s Olympic Basketball Team, the book describes the challenges faced by the trailblazing 1976 team to gain
- [Halfway Home](https://chapter16.org/halfway-home/) - I hauled my wedding china up an outdoor iron staircase and into the second floor of a midtown Craftsman duplex on a broiling August day. It felt like being dropped on a new planet. If I’d ever seen heat make the air actually shimmer before, I hadn’t stayed outside long enough to remember it. And
- [The Unbridled Game](https://chapter16.org/the-unbridled-game/) - The rule in girls’ basketball that limited players to half the court—three on offense and three on defense—sounds Victorian. But as Bill Haltom and Amanda Swanson write in Full Court Press, high-school girls in Tennessee were still playing that atavistic game as recently as 1979. The sport’s organizers believed young women couldn’t handle the physical
- [A Body in Need of a Home](https://chapter16.org/a-body-in-need-of-a-home/) - Shawna Kay Rodenberg’s family moved a lot when she was growing up. From Seco, Kentucky, to Grand Marias, Minnesota, to Duluth, Indiana, Rodenberg’s memoir Kin recounts their travels, detailing her own story and her family’s, as well. With a narrative so complex that one occasionally wishes for the aid of a family tree or a
- [Be Not Afraid](https://chapter16.org/be-not-afraid/) - “The play’s the thing” in Twelfth, Janet Key’s lively debut novel for middle-grade readers. It was not 12-year-old Maren Sands’ idea to attend Charlotte Goodman Theater Camp, but her parents insisted. They have their hands full caring for her older sister Hadley, who is in treatment for depression after dropping out of college. Theater is
- [A Liberation of Language and Lyric](https://chapter16.org/a-liberation-of-language-and-lyric/) - A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson is the latest book from the award-winning poet who currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Edited by Amor Kohli, a professor of African and Black diaspora studies at Depaul University, A Beat Beyond contains a wealth of notes, essays, reviews,
- [Always Graceful](https://chapter16.org/always-graceful/) - Margaret Renkl, founding editor of Chapter 16 and author of Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South, is living the fantasy life of many a journalist. She writes a weekly essay for The New York Times, a powerful pulpit from which to share her opinions and observations about the South,
- [The Word from Nashville](https://chapter16.org/the-word-from-nashville/) - With no pretense to being an expert on the subject, I believe the first newspaper columns were probably those brief essays written by the likes of Addison and Steele, Dr. Johnson, and other 17th- and 18th-century writers for publication in London coffeehouse news sheets like the Tatler and the Spectator. If you love newspapers, it’s
- [Drawn into Conflict](https://chapter16.org/drawn-into-conflict/) - Sixty years ago this September, after battles in the courtroom and on the streets of Oxford, Mississippi, James Meredith became the first Black student successfully enrolled in Ole Miss. His fight was just beginning. As Aram Goudsouzian acknowledges in the preface for Man on a Mission: James Meredith and the Battle of Ole Miss, this
- [Defenseless Against the Memory](https://chapter16.org/defenseless-against-the-memory/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on February 28, 2022. *** In West Tennessee native Bobby C. Rogers’ new poetry collection, Shift Work, the present gives way constantly to the disrupting nature of the past. Just walking down a Memphis street can flummox the inner senses — “Maybe every city is a
- [Outwardly Fine, Inwardly Lost](https://chapter16.org/outwardly-fine-inwardly-lost/) - From the outside, the unnamed protagonist of Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, Intimacies, is an elite woman who is excellent at her job as an interpreter for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She is fluent in English and Japanese through her parents, learned French through a childhood in Paris, and is competent in Spanish
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- [Shadowlands](https://chapter16.org/shadowlands/) - In the preface to Rogues, Patrick Radden Keefe’s collection of spellbinding New Yorker features, Keefe explains that he’s become a specialist in “the writearound” — articles whose subjects refuse to grant interviews. “It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them,” he writes,
- [Trying to Catch a Shadow](https://chapter16.org/trying-to-catch-a-shadow/) - Jim Thorpe’s tribal name, Path Lit by Lightning, is a memento of the stormy night in 1887 when he and his twin brother Charlie were born. In retrospect, the name seems apt for the multi-sport star who rose from obscurity to global renown as the world’s greatest athlete. But, as David Maraniss makes clear in
- [Teller of Tales](https://chapter16.org/teller-of-tales/) - Maggie Warshauer, the 17-year-old main character in Valerie Nieman’s intriguing new mystery, In the Lonely Backwater, may go down in literary history as one of the most memorable unreliable narrators since Rachel Watson in Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. From the outset, it’s clear that Maggie knows more than she’s saying about her
- [The Story Beneath the Sprawl](https://chapter16.org/the-story-beneath-the-sprawl/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on August 19, 2021. *** The remote past of the place we now call Nashville has been the source of a fair share of fanciful lore, from a hoax about an antediluvian human giant (in reality, a mastodon skeleton) to Nashville Predators mascot Gnash, inspired by saber-tooth
- [A Demand for Justice](https://chapter16.org/a-demand-for-justice/) - A rising star in the fight for racial justice, Nashvillian Justin Jones chronicles his activism in a new memoir, The People’s Plaza: Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance. Jones’ book begins in March 2020, a notably troubled time. Tornadoes had just ripped through Middle Tennessee, devastating communities including North Nashville, and citizens were entering the first
- [Illuminating the Invisible Work](https://chapter16.org/illuminating-the-invisible-work/) - Think of the word “contain.” Consider how it means two things: to hold, as well as to hold back. This is what we’re talking about when we talk about great personal essays, how they express the inexpressible, how they take us inside the writer’s life and, in usually fewer than 20 pages, return us to
- [Wonders and Weirdness and Hope](https://chapter16.org/wonders-and-weirdness-and-hope/) - “What if the story you think you know doesn’t end the way you think it does? What if magic really exists on this mountain and it’s looking for me?” asks 12-year-old Olive Miracle Martin, the main character and narrator of Hummingbird, Chattanooga writer Natalie Lloyd’s latest novel for children. Olive is an open-hearted heroine, full
- [Women in a World Designed for Men](https://chapter16.org/women-in-a-world-designed-for-men/) - In The War Librarian, Nashville-based writer Addison Armstrong confronts urgent contemporary cultural conflicts — misogyny, racism, and book banning — by taking a detailed dive into two moments in history. Armstrong’s primary characters are women fighting the harassment and injustice they faced 50 and 100 years ago, but their fictional struggles and outrage feel fresh
- [Welcome to Your New Eden](https://chapter16.org/welcome-to-your-new-eden/) - Bruce Holsinger’s The Displacements, which depicts the social upheaval caused by America’s first Category Six hurricane, is a big-hearted novel that embraces a broad swath of people whose lives are levelled by natural disaster. For all of their differences in socioeconomic status, these characters learn that their survival requires cooperation. No Pollyanna, Holsinger knows that
- [Seventy-Six Pounds of Wet Hair and Poor Decisions](https://chapter16.org/seventy-six-pounds-of-wet-hair-and-poor-decisions/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on October 4, 2021. It has been updated with new publication details. *** “To be truthful,” writes Rick Bragg in The Speckled Beauty, “I always wanted to write about a dog with a story to tell. I think a lot of writers do, the ones who
- [Leaving Hell Like a Dream Behind Them](https://chapter16.org/leaving-hell-like-a-dream-behind-them/) - Nazi war crimes and Cold War espionage fuel Bluebird, the new young adult novel by Nashville author Sharon Cameron. The historical thriller opens in 1946 as 18-year-old immigrant Eva Gerst and her friend Brigit Heidelmann get their first glimpse of New York City from the deck of their ship. Eva is fascinated by the carefree
- [The Singing Wire Between Joy and Grief](https://chapter16.org/the-singing-wire-between-joy-and-grief/) - In the pages of The New York Times, George Singleton has been ranked as one of “the great pillars of Southern literature.” Anyone who has spent time around Singleton could easily imagine what the one-time enfant terrible — inventor of a thousand absurdities and adoptive father of dozens of dogs, snakes, and opossums; a prankster
- [Defining One’s Place in the World](https://chapter16.org/defining-ones-place-in-the-world/) - Nell Young, the protagonist of Peng Shepherd’s second novel, The Cartographers, is born into a family of map scholars. Her mother’s celebrated career is cut short when Nell is only a toddler, but Nell grows up at her beloved father’s side, roaming the Map Division of the main branch of the New York Public Library,
- [Not the End of the World](https://chapter16.org/not-the-end-of-the-world/) - For a novel set in Los Angeles, a city legendary for its year-round sunshine, Nathan Elias’ Coil Quake Rift is strangely inundated with darkness. The gloom descends in the opening pages when Tiffany, a physicist studying black holes and dark matter, commits suicide. An experiment she scheduled for a year after her death causes a
- [The Glorious Pastime: Mary Laura Philpott](https://chapter16.org/the-glorious-pastime-mary-laura-philpott/) - In his review for Chapter 16, Ed Tarkington described Mary Laura Philpott’s 2019 book of essays, I Miss You When I Blink, as “a generous collection, written as if to say ‘I see you; you are not alone’ to the many readers who lead outwardly happy lives yet privately wonder why they don’t feel as
- [Let’s Go, Girls](https://chapter16.org/lets-go-girls/) - It’s been a long time since anyone would think it was OK to call Dolly Parton a “Country Barbie,” as a writer for The Guardian did about 20 years ago. But not enough has changed for women in country music since 2003, when The Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks) faced fierce backlash for saying they
- [“Rain”](https://chapter16.org/rain/) - Rain It rains in my heart — see Verlaine. Not a medical condition. Tread-mark on the back road. You want rhyme, Monsieur? It’s a toad. Other denizens find this charming. It rains in my heart, la la la. Yesterday was junior high, all day, through the night. Go buy an umbrella and walk off that
- [Becoming the Characters](https://chapter16.org/becoming-the-characters/) - A scorched-earth feeling permeates June Hall McCash’s sixth novel, which is set primarily on Georgia’s Jekyll Island and focuses on the du Bignon family, who fled their native country in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The Truth Keepers unfolds during the 19th century and is based on the true history of Henri du Bignon,
- [“Redpolls Feeding”](https://chapter16.org/redpolls-feeding/) - Redpolls Feeding They must keep irregular hours, so small they have to come in groups near the feeder when the other birds are away, and what a soft sound they make, and the faint blush from which they get their name, as though they feel embarrassed to be here at all, eating scraps off the
- [“Behind”](https://chapter16.org/behind/) - Behind Back behind the words another story is being told — a context other than one I would impose. May I dim in some new light’s narrative and — holding a page — glimpse a watermark, as if a whispered prayer I so easily might have lived without.
- [Southbound](https://chapter16.org/southbound/) - Imani Perry’s seventh book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, begins with a dance. The introduction whirls from describing the steps of a French quadrille to recounting a brawl at a New Orleans ball celebrating the Louisiana Purchase. From there, it moves on to African dances
- [An Unlikely Cast of Heroines](https://chapter16.org/an-unlikely-cast-of-heroines/) - Gwen E. Kirby’s bold debut collection of stories connects an unlikely cast of heroines across time and space, each encountering her own series of obstacles in pursuit of survival, pleasure, and fulfillment. In the collection’s title story, “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at That Point Fuck Them Anyway,” the archetypal
- [Reckoning as an Act of Love](https://chapter16.org/reckoning-as-an-act-of-love/) - My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song, Emily Bingham’s thoughtful, self-aware, intensely moral history of the Stephen Foster ballad, covers a spectacular amount of ground, from the origins of the song before the Civil War up to the present day. The song, composed in 1853, is probably best
- [Stepping into Their Own Power](https://chapter16.org/stepping-into-their-own-power/) - The morning after Agnes Cherie Kirkkendoll first spends the night with her new boyfriend, Prime, he comes into the kitchen to announce unceremoniously, “I read up on you.” Agnes, one of three protagonists in Destiny O. Birdsong’s Nobody’s Magic, has reason to believe the police are after her and is afraid she’s been in the
- [The Two Souths](https://chapter16.org/the-two-souths/) - “The South and the nation are not exchanging strengths as much as they are exchanging sins,” wrote John Egerton in his classic 1974 book The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America. “More often than not, they are sharing and spreading the worst in each other, while the best languishes and withers.” As the South surrendered
- [Archaic Snailfishing in Nashville](https://chapter16.org/archaic-snailfishing-in-nashville/) - All but three of the shell midden sites in Middle Tennessee are located at river confluences, where the Cumberland or Harpeth are fed by one of their larger tributaries. As those waterways enter the Cumberland, they deposit their bedloads, the mix of sediment and gravels that accumulates along their path. Before the natural character of
- [Everyone a Soldier](https://chapter16.org/everyone-a-soldier/) - Franklin writer Amanda McCrina’s The Silent Unseen grew out of the research for her previous World War II novel, Traitor, and a burning question it inspired. In an author’s note for the new book, she writes, “After ‘liberation,’ what happened to the millions of Eastern Europeans — many of them children, some as young as
- [Finding Her Literary Voice in the South](https://chapter16.org/finding-her-literary-voice-in-the-south/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on May 28, 2013. *** Cathie Pelletier’s first novel, The Funeral Makers, made a big splash when it came out in 1986, and over the next two decades she wrote ten more, including two under the pen name K. C. McKennon. One of those, Candles on
- [“Lazarus”](https://chapter16.org/lazarus/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on October 18, 2013. *** TJ Jarrett is a writer and software developer in Nashville. Her recent work has been published or is forthcoming in African American Review, Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boxcar Poetry Review, Callaloo, Southern Poetry Anthology, and others. Her debut collection, Ain’t No Grave
- [The City Of Light and Love](https://chapter16.org/the-city-of-light-and-love/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on February 5, 2014. *** “I hate writing,” Edmund White told a newspaper last year, but he has nevertheless been turning out celebrated titles since the 1970s, writing novels and nonfiction to wide acclaim and drawing on his life as a gay man for all but a handful
- [You Are What You Cook](https://chapter16.org/you-are-what-you-cook/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on May 6, 2014. *** According to Michael Pollan, what we do––or don’t do––in the kitchen says a lot about who we are. In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan apprentices himself to four culinary experts: a barbeque pit-master, a brazier, a baker, and a
- [Visible Signs](https://chapter16.org/visible-signs/) - One morning last summer, surveying my backyard through the glass door, I happened to look up, above the hydrangeas, above the steepled Japanese maple. Remnants of Hurricane Ida had brought needed rainfall to thirsty August, even the hardiest in my gardens splayed and panting. A glitter caught my eye, a wet-hung web, an orb weaver,
- [Nothing Contrived](https://chapter16.org/nothing-contrived/) - Hohenwald native William Gay, who published his first novel when he was in his late 50s, won acclaim for poetic prose and unforgettable characters who seem entirely true to the gritty Southern setting of his fiction. When Gay died suddenly in 2012, he left behind a considerable amount of unpublished work that has been slowly
- [Charting a Course](https://chapter16.org/charting-a-course/) - Jim Beattie has a face subject to frequent high color. He is a friend who lives several houses down the street, and he’s my classmate one year in either third or fourth grade. Like many children in the elementary years, we are running buddies for only a while, but most definitely from age 8 to
- [A Man and His Mandolin](https://chapter16.org/a-man-and-his-mandolin/) - In Mandolin Man: The Bluegrass Life of Roland White, author and banjo player Bob Black gives us a book about a musician in which the music rings out — and is never drowned out. That’s because White seems to have been one of those rare legends who always put the music first, who treated his
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- [Big Man on Campus](https://chapter16.org/big-man-on-campus/) - “He died from drinking a bottle of Lysol,” James Dickey said. The big man paused to stare at us, eyes bright as he smiled the half-smile of the Sheriff from his scene in Deliverance. As though leaning down to Jon Voight’s car window to ask about life jackets, Mr. Dickey delivered his best line of
- [Making Believe](https://chapter16.org/making-believe/) - “It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be believed.” This grim adage comes from Alexander Nix, former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that once served the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. What the average Joe calls lying, influence peddlers call winning. Conscience, in such contexts, is
- [When the Looking Changes](https://chapter16.org/when-the-looking-changes/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This article originally appeared on March 22, 2018. *** There is a photograph in Teju Cole's Blind Spot that was taken at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. In 1965, when hundreds of civil-rights activists marched across it, state troopers met them with swinging nightsticks and tear-gas canisters. It
- [A Different Appalachian Upbringing](https://chapter16.org/a-different-appalachian-upbringing/) - One of the early memories Neema Avashia recounts in Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place happens just outside the South Charleston Junior Women’s Club, sometime in the mid-1980s. Neema, about five years old, is running around with her friends, popping salted peanuts into cups of Coke to watch the brown
- [“Acceptance”](https://chapter16.org/acceptance/) - Acceptance Fingertips numb, Jonah knew to pray. We imagine him— three days, three nights in a cavern of belly, dark and hollow. But wasn’t it stifling, full of tissue and muscle working him down and through. And water. Like the water from the creek where my father burned our weekly trash, building the fire at
- [A Fight Over the Mountain Commons](https://chapter16.org/a-fight-over-the-mountain-commons/) - In the 19th century, large numbers of people living in southern and central Appalachia supported themselves to varying degrees by harvesting herbs, roots, and other medicinal botanicals that grew wild in the mountain woodlands around them. These “sang diggers,” as they were colloquially known, and the story of their importance to the global botanical pharmaceutical
- [Shareable Treasures](https://chapter16.org/shareable-treasures/) - I used to think about the longevity of gifts. What could be given that would be cherished for more than a handful of days or a couple of weeks? A pie is a safe gift, but, in my experience as a recipient, even a mediocre one doesn’t last more than a few minutes. A birdhouse
- [Re-election](https://chapter16.org/re-election/) - Every few years, Tom Perrotta does it again. With plots that seem ripped from the headlines and characters who are both emblematic and unique, he weaves together the evergreen and the contemporary, perfectly capturing the suburban middle-American zeitgeist he’s staked an expert claim to in book after book after book. His latest, Tracy Flick Can’t
- [Save Yourself](https://chapter16.org/save-yourself/) - In “Peaches, 1979,” an emblematic story from Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new collection How Strange a Season, a college-educated woman, Darcy, returns home to save her family’s failing orchard, despite the fact that she doesn’t particularly like them. “It was hard to spend time with people she loved but didn’t enjoy when she was tired from
- [Woven in the Seams](https://chapter16.org/woven-in-the-seams/) - Diane C. McPhail’s time living in New Orleans coupled with her love of history inspired The Seamstress of New Orleans. While the characters in the novel are fictional, the events and locales echo fact. “New Orleans in 1900 was the setting of a grand ball put on by Les Mysterieuses,” McPhail states in the Q&A
- [Building Momentum](https://chapter16.org/building-momentum/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on February 17, 2010. *** "If you're fortunate, as I have been, and you the get the opportunity to write a series of novels that goes on and on," Michael Connelly said in a recent video diary of a research trip to Hong Kong, "you come
- [Return to Rocksalt](https://chapter16.org/return-to-rocksalt/) - The epigraph “These hills don’t change” in Chris Offutt’s Shifty’s Boys is lifted from Cesare Pavese’s “South Seas,” a prose poem about Pavese's native Langhe hills in Italy, highland country where laborers made a paltry sum working in the wineries. Nobody is making an honest fortune in Offutt’s hills of eastern Kentucky, either, and like 2021’s
- [Deconstructing a Dog](https://chapter16.org/deconstructing-a-dog/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on August 8, 2016. *** Are pit bulls genetically programmed killing machines, so innately vicious they’re a threat to public safety? Or are they actually sweet, loving “nanny dogs,” unfairly maligned because of their sad history of abuse at the hands of humans? Whether you’re the
- [My Favorite Chapter](https://chapter16.org/my-favorite-chapter/) - As a lifelong and enthusiastic reader, I believe passionately in the power of the written word — its ability to educate, challenge, inspire, and delight. But I never seriously thought of becoming a writer. From time to time throughout my life, people who read a letter of mine or a school assignment told me that
- [A Southern Ramble](https://chapter16.org/a-southern-ramble/) - In September 1867, when John Muir was not yet 30, the future founder of the Sierra Club set off from Louisville on a long trek through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. His diary of the trip became A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, published in 1916 — two years after his death and
- [Marlboro Woman](https://chapter16.org/marlboro-woman/) - In the midst of breaking up with a boyfriend back in Los Angeles, Ree Drummond did not have romance on her mind when she met friends for a drink during a visit to her hometown of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Nevertheless, that fateful night, a handsome, soft-spoken, fourth-generation cattle rancher unexpectedly entered her life. As Drummond writes
- [Faction Jackson](https://chapter16.org/faction-jackson/) - Donald Trump loves Andrew Jackson. While president, Trump tweeted about “Old Hickory,” laid a wreath on his grave, hung his portrait in the Oval Office, and even proclaimed that Jackson could have stopped the Civil War. Somewhat like Trump, Jackson was a populist hero who drew accusations of bigotry and tyranny. Yet as David S.
- [Sex, God, and Politics](https://chapter16.org/sex-god-and-politics/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on December 7, 2017. *** Why can’t we all just get along? How have we become so politically divided? In Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics, R. Marie Griffith argues that the answer lies, in part, in diverging religious ideas about
- [Secrets and Lies](https://chapter16.org/secrets-and-lies/) - There probably will not be a more intriguing line of text in a crime thriller this year than the one protagonist Claire Hunter delivers in J.T. Ellison’s latest suspense thriller, Her Dark Lies: “I never said I was a good person.” A Nashville artist on the way to becoming the latest wife of eccentric entrepreneur
- [The Chance to Do It Over](https://chapter16.org/the-chance-to-do-it-over/) - This Time Tomorrow, the new novel by Emma Straub, stands out as the only book of the year (so far) that’s both a surprising bildungsroman and excellent beach reading. It fizzes like pop and goes down easily while offering nutritional literary value. Each of Straub’s previous four novels, along with her short story collection, has
- [The Hard Beauty](https://chapter16.org/the-hard-beauty/) - At the center of A Year Without Months — the compelling new memoir-in-essays by Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White — lies a brutal biographical fact: the suicides of White’s father, uncle, and son. In a haunting preface, he sets these deaths in the context of his tangled family history and establishes that this book’s trajectory
- [Three-Day Business Trip](https://chapter16.org/three-day-business-trip/) - *FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay, chosen as one of the winners of the inaugural Tennessee True Stories Essay Contest, originally appeared on January 31, 2020. *** Chapter 16 is pleased to publish the winners in our Tennessee True Stories Essay Contest. Regarding Mirsad Kulovic's winning essay, contest judge Mary Laura Philpott writes: WOW.
- [Tracking a Killer](https://chapter16.org/tracking-a-killer/) - Near the end of Kathryn Miles’ Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, the author recalls the day someone asked her why she was so determined to help discover who killed Julie Williams and Lollie Winans in Shenandoah National Park in May 1996. The two women, trained backcountry leaders in their 20s, beloved
- [Stories More Like Memories](https://chapter16.org/stories-more-like-memories/) - The Crocodile Bride, the debut novel by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, is a gripping family saga about the power of storytelling — especially its ability to warm and soften the edges of cold, harsh reality. Pedersen creates a world at once tragic and beautiful, violent and magical, desperately impoverished yet rich in meaning. It’s the summer
- [The Man as a Writer](https://chapter16.org/the-man-as-a-writer/) - James Dickey may be best known for his 1970 novel Deliverance and its 1972 film adaptation, for which he wrote the screenplay and in which he played the role of Sheriff. In the decades before the wildly successful film, he became one of America’s most celebrated — if often controversial — poets. During the decades
- [“The Columbine: Terri in Her Garden”](https://chapter16.org/the-columbine-terri-in-her-garden/) - The Columbine: Terri in Her Garden The silence within each word, the simple syntax of wind whispered against the chimes, the owl’s answers echoed in the dark spaces dappling the immense, impossible sky between stars, drifting as they have since the beginning, everything becoming only what it will become, though I could not have seen
- [“Hosea’s Appeal”](https://chapter16.org/hoseas-appeal/) - Hosea’s Appeal Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing. ~Hosea 4:3 If you would listen, you could hear
- [A Cosmos of Its Own](https://chapter16.org/a-cosmos-of-its-own/) - Bix Bouton, the first protagonist in Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, is the founder of a landscape-changing tech media company, but he’s plagued by fears that he won’t be able to repeat his success. “I’m afraid I can’t do it again,” he admits. After the critical and commercial triumph of 2010’s A Visit from the
- [The Glorious Pastime: Anjali Enjeti](https://chapter16.org/the-glorious-pastime-anjali-enjeti/) - In the essay “What Are You? Where Are You From?” — the introduction to her 2021 collection, Southbound — Anjali Enjeti writes, “I am half Indian, a quarter Puerto Rican, and a quarter Austrian. I am an immigrant’s daughter and also a daughter of the Deep South.” Enjeti, who grew up in Chattanooga and now
- [Fish Out of Water](https://chapter16.org/fish-out-of-water/) - Cathey Daniels explores the mountains of North Carolina and the rippled impact of family abuse in her debut novel, Live Caught. Divided into two sections set 10 years apart, the story conveys the feeling of being a fish on a hook: caught. As the novel opens, the protagonist, Lenny, is 14 years old and running
- [The Mission of the Family](https://chapter16.org/the-mission-of-the-family/) - At age 52, Adriana Trigiani reigns as one of the most prolific and prodigious queens of women’s fiction. She’s published a novel or work of nonfiction almost every year since 2000. This is not to mention her dramatic writing for stage and screen, or her recent children’s picture book. Her work teems with plotlines, dialogue,
- [Emily’s Way](https://chapter16.org/emilys-way/) - Every April, I send out a campus-wide email inviting my colleagues to celebrate Poetry Month with me. Those who sign up receive a poem in their inbox every work day that month. I don’t remember why I started this except that I like poetry and perhaps suspected that, like me, my colleagues would read more
- [War in the Streets](https://chapter16.org/war-in-the-streets/) - City on Fire, the latest thriller by Don Winslow, is unapologetic, brutal, and in-your-face — as any good crime novel should be. But City on Fire is better than good. Winslow pulls no punches in this story of a mob war that erupts in 1980s New England between Irish and Italian Americans, sparked by irrational
- [Poor Girls from the Countryside](https://chapter16.org/poor-girls-from-the-countryside/) - Steve Yarbrough opens his latest novel, Stay Gone Days, with these words: “In Ella’s recollections, their house stands on the east side of the gravel road, a cotton field to the north, an orchard to the south. It’s a boxy little two-bedroom with Sheetrock siding, hot in spring and summer, cold in fall and winter.
- [Father Knows Best](https://chapter16.org/father-knows-best/) - Bassist Mark Hembree’s On the Bus with Bill Monroe gives us the legendary Father of Blue Grass as we’ve come to know him: intimidating, sometimes imperious, and nigh on impossible to really know. The music, of course, was matchless. The music was thrilling — wild yet precise. But the man himself? Monroe was, well, complex.
- [“The Last Time”](https://chapter16.org/the-last-time/) - The Last Time The last time I saw my mother, she was sitting in the front passenger seat of my father’s car. I looked down into her face through the open window. She looked up at me and smiled, said hello. Her right hand resting on the door. She looked older than her age, but
- [Little Town Killer](https://chapter16.org/little-town-killer/) - Jeremy Scott, author of The Ables series and co-creator of YouTube’s CinemaSins, returns with the propulsive and thrilling When the Corn Is Waist High. Set in the 1980s in the small town of Crooked Creek, Indiana, Scott’s novel opens with a murder. This might not seem like the most original of hooks, but Scott smartly
- [The Bread of Life](https://chapter16.org/the-bread-of-life/) - In What We Wish Were True, Tallu Schuyler Quinn prepares herself and her readers for the final surrender to death. In the summer of 2020, while the world confronted a pandemic and a reckoning with national and global injustice, Quinn learned she had glioblastoma, an incurable, malignant brain tumor with a life expectancy of two
- [Art in the Pandemic](https://chapter16.org/art-in-the-pandemic/) - In a Zoom call, you occupy a box, and you stare out at tenants inhabiting the other poorly lit boxes. Zoom enables communication, but it lacks authenticity. There is some grief in the way of cloistered communications in our off-screen lives, as well. My fix for this state of mind is to explore art museums
- [Sinners List](https://chapter16.org/sinners-list/) - The day that our handyman committed suicide, he cleaned out my parents’ garage. They hadn’t asked him to purge the junk from those overstuffed car bays, the ones that hadn’t sheltered a vehicle since we moved in, but Harold saw that it needed to be done. He left the garage doors open so they would
- [First Love](https://chapter16.org/first-love/) - “Before I began, I loved her. This was what I knew. Before bones and blood and body, before egg.” In the opening line of her debut novel, Here Lies, Olivia Clare Friedman captures an emotion that is both foundational and indefinable, a feeling so primordial it predates our own memory of existence: a child’s love
- [Made to Survive](https://chapter16.org/made-to-survive/) - The opening poem of Ocean Vuong’s new collection, Time Is a Mother, describes a bracing encounter between a young boy and a bull, representing the many internal standoffs he will face throughout the book: “I / reached for him. I reached—not the bull— / but the depths.” Vuong’s 2016 debut collection, Night Sky with Exit
- [Saving What Remains](https://chapter16.org/saving-what-remains/) - Every photograph says “remember.” It’s no surprise then that poet Natasha Trethewey enters into the prologue of Memorial Drive, a memoir about her mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, by looking at the last image of Gwendolyn, taken a few months before her murder. Her black dress blends in with the backdrop, and Trethewey says her mother
- [Different Drums](https://chapter16.org/different-drums/) - The fourth book in Macmillan’s “Based on a True Story” series for middle-grade readers, John Lincoln Clem: Civil War Drummer Boy, is the tale of Johnny Clem, a drummer boy for the Union side during the Battle of Shiloh. Writing under the pseudonym of E.F. Abbott, Williamson County author Kristin O’Donnell Tubb tells a story
- [Alien Summer in a Day](https://chapter16.org/alien-summer-in-a-day/) - Carsen Smith, a 2018 Vanderbilt graduate now living in New York City, loves comedy. As a kid, she was fascinated with Area 51, the top-secret U.S. facility in Nevada, and the mythology and urban legends it spawns. Today, she combines those two things — comedy and possible aliens — in her sci-fi (and very funny)
- [A Symphony of Listeners](https://chapter16.org/a-symphony-of-listeners/) - In theatre, the phrase “in the round” refers to a stage placed with an audience on at least three of its sides; in Nashville, it is often used in reference to a performance of multiple singer-songwriters who take turns playing their songs around a semicircle. Amy Wright’s Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round employs
- [“Otter Creek Road February 9, 2001”](https://chapter16.org/otter-creek-road-february-9-2001/) - Otter Creek Road February 9, 2001 Don't get excited — when I say one reason god loves cedar trees at night is it's so dark in there he can hide and watch us up close and no one see he's there, and that tickles him — it's just a description. It's just to make you
- [“April’s Breath”](https://chapter16.org/aprils-breath/) - April’s Breath She sought to wake me subtle, a nudge against winter remnants, bleak rain, light too short, dark cut my cadence. Purple phlox lined the windy drive like soldiers greet wounded fresh from battle. March frogs orchestrated praise hymns from the barn bog, escorted me up the weary steps. I first noticed late light
- [Rough and Rowdy](https://chapter16.org/rough-and-rowdy/) - Somewhere under Davidson County and its surrounding areas, Timothy Demonbreun is buried. Elizabeth Elkins, author of We Should Soon Become Respectable: Nashville’s Own Timothy Demonbreun, notes that his final resting place is either “lost, moved, or paved over.” None of his nearest descendants — which equaled some 10 children with 3 different women — left
- [Searching for the U.S.S. Flagg](https://chapter16.org/searching-for-the-u-s-s-flagg/) - When I was a kid, I would plop my scrawny body down on the living room carpet after school to watch G.I. Joe: Real American Hero. During commercial breaks, I salivated over the latest G.I. Joe toys. My mouth dropped open the first time I saw the U.S.S. Flagg, an aircraft carrier that stretched over
- [The Mirror and the Magnifying Glass](https://chapter16.org/the-mirror-and-the-magnifying-glass/) - The bildungsroman, or novel of education, should be the most open of genres, its lessons variable to time and circumstance. In practice, however, novels and films about children follow predictable paths and teach only platitudes. Follow your heart. Be true to yourself. Do the right thing. Leave it to Joel Agee — the son of
- [Without Fear or Condescension](https://chapter16.org/without-fear-or-condescension/) - Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor’s Journey to Broadway’s Biggest Stage is Mickey Rowe’s memoir of growing up with autism and his barrier-breaking career. Most notably, Rowe starred as Christopher Boone in the Tony Award-winning play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He was the first autistic actor to portray an autistic character
- [A Mystery Set to Music](https://chapter16.org/a-mystery-set-to-music/) - It’s a book. It’s an album. It’s a Spotify “bookcast.” And its movie potential is obvious. Run, Rose, Run, a collaboration by Dolly Parton and James Patterson, juggernauts in their respective lanes of music and publishing, promises to be a multimedia steamroller itself. Print journalists avoid superlatives — ‘best,’ ‘most,’ ‘greatest’ — because someone, somewhere
- [Doing the Work](https://chapter16.org/doing-the-work/) - A poet’s autobiography is his poetry,” said Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. “Anything else is just a footnote.” In her fifth poetry collection, National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney says no to this. She stacks new poems alongside artifacts of her life, handing us an immaculately curated book that integrates her “footnotes” into an essential collage
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- [The Promise of a Person](https://chapter16.org/the-promise-of-a-person/) - “I’m not sure when I became an imposter,” explains 17-year-old Jess in The Storyteller, the new YA novel by Kathryn Williams. “It wasn’t a conscious decision, more a slow, smooth slide into something that felt, just, easier.” It was easier to play soccer at her mother’s insistence, for example, than to fight for the piano
- [Travel and Disappearance](https://chapter16.org/travel-and-disappearance/) - The reissue of Kiese Laymon’s Long Division echoes a familiar Black church precept of doing your first works over. In this new iteration of his 2013 debut novel, Laymon separates the story into two books, or testaments, each centered around 14-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson. In a manner that conjures up W.E.B. DuBois’ ‘double-consciousness,’ we are
- [Singin’ in the Rain](https://chapter16.org/singin-in-the-rain/) - Here’s a little secret about me: I love singing. My closest friends already know this, and maybe they’re close because they’ve heard me sing at one point or another (and a lot of the times, vice versa). For me, though, loving singing is an entirely different thing from being good at it. In fact, it’s one of
- [A Troubled South](https://chapter16.org/a-troubled-south/) - “I’ve always had the same predicament,” Owen Callahan states in the opening line of Lee Cole’s debut novel, Groundskeeping. “When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was.” Owen has recently returned to his hometown after failing to make it on his
- [Double the Thrills](https://chapter16.org/double-the-thrills/) - There is twice the action at hand for fans of Mark Greaney’s Gray Man as the covert operative chases down a ghost from his past in the new thriller Sierra Six. With a much-anticipated Netflix movie adaptation starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans slated to drop this year, the origin tale becomes especially relevant to
- [Parting Shot](https://chapter16.org/parting-shot/) - “I keep extensive records of my favorite cases,” Spenser tells a waterfront criminal in Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby, the tenth novel Mississippi-based writer Ace Atkins has penned in the iconic detective series. Extensive indeed: Their conversation centers on a deceased mobster named Joe Broz, who appeared in Parker’s 1973 novel The Godwulf Manuscript,
- [Turning Hard Lessons into Action](https://chapter16.org/turning-hard-lessons-into-action/) - “I had never been inside a jail before in my life,” writes Keeda Haynes of her first real job, the one she dreamed about as a teenager growing up in Franklin. “I had never even seen movies or read books about life inside jails — so I had no idea what to expect.” But as
- [Prowling Like Maggie the Cat](https://chapter16.org/prowling-like-maggie-the-cat/) - The late Nashville poet Diann Blakely died in 2014 of a chronic lung disorder, a few years short of her sixtieth birthday. A lifelong rebel and pioneer, Blakely carved out for herself a niche only she was equipped to occupy. Her disappearance from the literary scene at a moment when she should have had a
- [Stories Connect Us](https://chapter16.org/stories-connect-us/) - “It is important to know how one’s story begins, especially in our family,” explains Sarah Macmillan to her daughter in Geographies of the Heart, the first novel by Knoxville writer Caitlin Hamilton Summie. “Stories connect us; words are our banners and flags. We have no crest. We have the twining of our chapters.” Summie brings
- [“Penelope Looks Back”](https://chapter16.org/penelope-looks-back/) - Penelope Looks Back You know, I thought you were a fool, and if I were lovely and clever, I wouldn’t wait, idle behind shrouds while my probably dead, definitely faithless, irresponsible egomaniacal selfish manchild husband goads vengeful gods and gawks at sirens. Late night, I would go toward a swaying ship of my own, tiptoe
- [Freedom and Fries](https://chapter16.org/freedom-and-fries/) - Every year, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis bestows an award for the nonfiction book, originally published in the previous year, that best furthers understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy. The 2020 winner is Marcia Chatelain’s Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, a
- [No Regrets](https://chapter16.org/no-regrets/) - I have donated my collection of books on writing to my local library. Why? We will get to that. The books were gathered over a period of 40 years or so. I didn’t publish my first novel until 2013, but I cannot recall a time I didn’t think about telling my stories on paper. The
- [A Season of Storms](https://chapter16.org/a-season-of-storms/) - Jennifer Haigh’s new novel Mercy Street begins in January 2015 as Boston is hit by the snowiest winter in 364 years or “roughly how long people have been complaining about the weather here.” Locals find words like “severe” or “powerful” or “wicked” insufficient to describe the storms. “Boston — not the jolliest city on its
- [My NBA Love Affairs](https://chapter16.org/my-nba-love-affairs/) - My football fandom was never in doubt. The son of two Texas Exes, season ticket holders who decorated our living room with burnt-orange regalia, I inherited Longhorn football the way I was bequeathed Mom’s eyelashes and Dad’s bad back. No complaints, though. Dozens of my fondest childhood memories derive from singing “Texas Fight.” In City
- [Foot Soldier for Justice](https://chapter16.org/foot-soldier-for-justice/) - "I was just seventeen," writes Kathlyn J. Kirkwood in the opening lines of Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round, "a senior at Booker T. Washington High / in Memphis, Tennessee." It is 1968 as she steps down Beale Street with her school's marching band in a celebration kept separate from the "Whites only" Cotton
- [Everything Here Is Dead](https://chapter16.org/everything-here-is-dead/) - In the acknowledgments section of his most recent middle-grade novel, The Visitors, Greg Howard says that this was “the most challenging story” he’s written. It’s easy to see why. The novel includes sensitive themes (slavery, sexual orientation and identity, bullying, betrayal, abuse, suicide); the main character is unable to remember anything about his life; and
- [A Factory of Dreams](https://chapter16.org/a-factory-of-dreams/) - Mesha Maren’s themes dwell along the margins, both of geography and identity. Her acclaimed debut, Sugar Run, tells the story of a doomed lesbian romance in Appalachian coal country between an ex-convict and a battered wife. Her follow-up, Perpetual West, continues Maren’s genre-straddling exploration of the lives of restless, troubled characters drawn to downtrodden, disregarded
- [Six Haiku](https://chapter16.org/six-haiku/) - merging into a single blue lake and sky the crickets sometimes they change tune horses snort breath from their nostrils fills the air amid cracked stones of the cemetery — wild strawberries slow falling star forming a line with the airplanes Big Dipper flying through it: jet plane
- [Trumpeter Swan](https://chapter16.org/trumpeter-swan/) - According to the notes in my old National Geographic bird guide, on November 8, 1980, I saw a trumpeter swan at the Crabtree Nature Center in Barrington Hills, Illinois. A life bird. My mother had been in the hospital in downtown Chicago for nearly two months. I had been at her side in September when
- [Where’s Bitsy?](https://chapter16.org/wheres-bitsy/) - Gone Missin’ is the second installment in Peggy O’Neal Peden’s Nashville mystery series. While her debut, Your Killin’ Heart, centered on the city’s music scene, Gone Missin’ focuses on Nashville’s old money society. This is the world of mansions, private schools, nannies, country clubs, and charity balls — a world where regular people should never
- [Called to the Water](https://chapter16.org/called-to-the-water/) - Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue — a new anthology of speculative fiction co-edited by lauded Memphis writer Sheree Renée Thomas — celebrates the boundless wealth of creative sustenance offered by our world’s bodies of water. Any anthology taking on a subject as vast and various as our world’s bodies of water would
- [Like Walking into a Poem](https://chapter16.org/like-walking-into-a-poem/) - On the opening page of Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, poet Kate Daniels makes a provocative statement about the several years she spent with an analyst. “Sometimes, it was like walking into the intensely compressed words of a poem itself,” she writes. “Eventually it became like walking into a
- [Forgotten Flora](https://chapter16.org/forgotten-flora/) - “There is a human prejudice in favor of animals,” an Alabama botanist tells author Georgann Eubanks midway through Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction. “People are much more interested in the big, brown-eyed Florida panther than, say, Furbish’s lousewort.” It’s a sentiment echoed throughout the book: An
- [The Crafts of Freedom](https://chapter16.org/the-crafts-of-freedom/) - On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was summoned to the Bishop Mason Temple in Memphis to address the striking sanitation workers and their supporters. King wasn’t scheduled to speak at the rally, but Reverend Ralph Abernathy, sensing the crowd’s disappointment, had persuaded King to come from the Lorraine Hotel to make a few
- [The Best Way to Pray Is Just to Cry](https://chapter16.org/the-best-way-to-pray-is-just-to-cry/) - In Katherine Paterson’s new middle grade novel, Birdie’s Bargain, 10-year-old Elizabeth “Birdie” Cunningham is sure that her dad’s third tour of duty overseas with the National Guard will end with his death. Birdie is dealing with a lot of complicated emotions for someone her age. Not only is she worried about her dad, but there’s
- [Much-Needed Reckonings](https://chapter16.org/much-needed-reckonings/) - Chantha Nguon and I sipped Angkor beers in a moonlit village and cooked up a plan. I’d been hired by a Nashville philanthropist to co-write Chantha’s memoir — of surviving wars and terrible losses to found a nonprofit women’s center in rural Cambodia. Chantha was skeptical of this idea. Her own history, she felt, was
- [Feeding a Movement](https://chapter16.org/feeding-a-movement/) - We often associate the civil rights and Black Power movements with the dramatic, confrontational spectacles of marches, speeches, and mass demonstrations. In Power Hungry, Suzanne Cope tells a different kind of story. Her book profiles Aylene Quin, a restaurant owner in McComb, Mississippi, and Memphis resident Cleo Silvers, who joined the Black Panther Party and
- [A Storyteller’s Life](https://chapter16.org/a-storytellers-life/) - Katherine Paterson’s Stories of My Life is a loving look back at an extraordinary life. Paterson was born in China in 1932, the child of Christian missionaries. War twice forced the family to flee the country, the last time permanently, and Paterson always longed to return. But even after she graduated from King College in
- [“Ascension”](https://chapter16.org/ascension/) - Ascension The blue jays lay claim to the raspberry bush arriving in groups of four or five: one holds a rubied berry in its beak and feeds it up in the white pine to another as if placing the bones of the canonized into a gilded reliquary, and I think of the saint for the
- [Shades of Humanity](https://chapter16.org/shades-of-humanity/) - A decade ago, Nashville writer Ruta Sepetys enjoyed “the kind of kind of year every debut novelist dreams of” with the publication of Between Shades of Gray, a young adult novel. The story, which follows a 15-year-old girl deported from Lithuania to Siberia during Stalin’s reign of terror, became a Golden Kite winner and an
- [A Tennessee Christmas](https://chapter16.org/a-tennessee-christmas/) - “We cut our own Christmas trees in East Tennessee.” I once said that to someone and was told that it sounded as if I had grown up inside a Norman Rockwell painting. That’s a nice thought. Cutting one’s own Christmas tree certainly does evoke images of a happy family pulling a sleigh through snowy landscapes
- [Humming](https://chapter16.org/humming/) - My father stands at the kitchen counter, reaches for the ballpoint pen with this left hand, clicks it open, then fits the pen into his right hand. He wraps the stiff fingers of his right hand around the pen and begins to scrawl on the paper. His handwriting is spikey and jagged. He stops and
- [Little Lost Girl](https://chapter16.org/little-lost-girl/) - My father worked at a store called AMC, a “big box” before generics like Costco and Walmart became ubiquitous. Dubbed “The House of Name Brands” by the four brothers who opened it in Oklahoma City in the early 1960s, AMC was built to look like a giant circus tent with points made of poured concrete.
- [Hope Smiles](https://chapter16.org/hope-smiles/) - The broad-shouldered, stocky shopper with the expression of a man on a mission stepped up to the counter and carefully deposited his haul: two stacks, six boxes high each, of soft-soled bedroom slippers in various cheerful prints. An even dozen. Noticing his black jacket, embroidered with a restaurant logo and buttoned up the side in the style
- [The Games of Life](https://chapter16.org/the-games-of-life/) - I can hear them even now, more than a half-century later. The yelling. In the winter, it was indoors at a gateleg table in the dining room. In the summer, on the screened-in back porch where the night sounds of crickets, tree frogs, and racoons were overwhelmed by the outbursts, the anguished cries, the accusations.
- [The Girl Their Hymns Forgot](https://chapter16.org/the-girl-their-hymns-forgot/) - In a review for The New York Times, Joel Brouwer once described a “fun game for poetry nerds: read the first line or sentence of a favorite poet’s first book, and imagine it as a summary of the writer’s entire career.” With Hive, the debut collection of Nashville poet Christina Stoddard, it’s possible to take
- [Where No M.E. Has Gone Before](https://chapter16.org/where-no-m-e-has-gone-before/) - Dr. Kay Scarpetta goes where no medical examiner has gone before — outer space — in Autopsy, the 25th outing for Patricia Cornwell’s popular forensic pathologist-turned-detective. Well, sort of. Along with her husband Benton Wesley, a forensic psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service, Scarpetta is recruited by the White House as part of its Doomsday
- [“Ballad”](https://chapter16.org/ballad/) - Ballad Sycamores jut above a daybreak wet with steam. The groundhogs are making coffee. The heron flies above the tree line, drumstick legs stretched rigid, wing-flap on the upbeat like a crooked song wounding the sky. A family of house finches makes a dust bath in the gravels at the end of my driveway. They
- [“The Holes I Have”](https://chapter16.org/the-holes-i-have/) - The Holes I Have A soft light reflects on my walls filling the room with cheerful, dancing silhouettes images tracing along hidden places flood my brain through these holes in my head called eyes. These strange creatures soar through the pinks, blues & whites of the covers quilted happiness to the strands and stories heard
- [Storytellers with Loud Guitars](https://chapter16.org/storytellers-with-loud-guitars/) - Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers, music journalist Stephen Deusner’s saga of the greatest American rock band ever (there — I said it), is filled with wonder and wander. Wonder, as in how Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley persevered through the hostile indifference toward their early musical endeavors to
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- [Made from Angels and Dirt](https://chapter16.org/made-from-angels-and-dirt/) - In Practically Divine, social entrepreneur and Episcopal priest Becca Stevens explores how the wisdom of women opens a place for love to grow even in the aftermath of trauma. Twenty-five years ago, Stevens founded Thistle Farms as a residential community and cottage industry for survivors of trafficking in Nashville. Since then, she has founded 10
- [Just the Way We Were](https://chapter16.org/just-the-way-we-were/) - I maintain a few friendships that began more than two or three decades ago. In most cases, with friends I first met in high school or college or thereabouts, I imagine them as when I last saw them, a few months or a few years ago. I even imagine some as they are today —
- [“The Voice Is My Key”](https://chapter16.org/the-voice-is-my-key/) - Dan O’Brien, who has served on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for more than a decade, is an award-winning playwright and widely published poet, with a long list of honors that includes the 2018 PEN America Literary Award — Los Angeles in Drama (for The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage)
- [Lifting the Veil on Slavery](https://chapter16.org/lifting-the-veil-on-slavery/) - Whenever one of my graduate students is beginning a research project about Memphis history, I always start with the same advice: Go see Wayne Dowdy. As senior manager of the Memphis Public Library’s history department, Dowdy knows all the archival material that tells the story of the city. He is an accomplished author in his
- [The Things That Come for Us All](https://chapter16.org/the-things-that-come-for-us-all/) - Nashville writer Ann Patchett’s second volume of essays, These Precious Days, is a grab bag of personable pieces drawn from Patchett’s life, infused with a perspective that somehow manages to be both down-to-earth and utterly singular. The unique sensibility Patchett brings to her essays is suggested by an exchange in the title piece here: A
- [Taken](https://chapter16.org/taken/) - In over 30 years of travel abroad, I’ve had ample opportunity to haggle for things in exotic markets. I’ve traded with Masai tribesmen in the Ngong Hills of Kenya, purchased gold in Dubai, and bartered for antique muskets in Kabul. I’ve dealt with arms dealers in Abu Dhabi, relic merchants in the jungles of Ecuador,
- ["A View That Wasn't There Before"](https://chapter16.org/a-view-that-wasnt-there-before/) - A View That Wasn’t There Before In the morning be one person, in the afternoon another, and thereby escape the usual constraints of existence, especially in terms of expectations, not that doing so will make much difference. A healthy indifference gives the matter a looseness that allows for almost anything to enter
- [Hard Honest Comedy](https://chapter16.org/hard-honest-comedy/) - Fans of Padgett Powell’s fiction expect to find in Indigo, his first collection of nonfiction, quirky characters and inimitable prose, and they won’t be disappointed. Another set of readers, unfamiliar with Powell’s catalogue but drawn to this book by ecstatic reviews and superlative blurbage (“one of the few truly important American writers of our time,”
- [Fiery and Hopeful](https://chapter16.org/fiery-and-hopeful/) - Michael Eric Dyson, an ordained Baptist minister and public intellectual whose books include Tears We Cannot Stop, The Black Presidency, and Long Time Coming, was recently appointed Vanderbilt University Centennial Chair and University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies. He also serves as University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society at the Vanderbilt
- [A Faith Observed](https://chapter16.org/a-faith-observed/) - In a posthumous collection of essays, bestselling author and self-described “religious overachiever” Rachel Held Evans describes a way of pursuing God that embraces uncertainty, vulnerability, and compassion. Evans’ friend, author Jeff Chu, has revised her unfinished manuscript and compiled other unpublished essays to create Wholehearted Faith, the final book from this beloved writer and activist
- [Harm Reduction](https://chapter16.org/harm-reduction/) - Journalist Sam Quinones’ 2015 book Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic laid bare how enterprising Mexican drug dealers and greedy pharmaceutical companies converged with the economic decline of American towns to create what is perhaps the most staggering tragedy of our time. In that book, he shows how companies like Purdue Pharma created
- ["Packing Light"](https://chapter16.org/packing-light/) - Marilyn Kallet is the author of 14 books, which include translations, children's books, personal essays, literary criticism, and anthologies of women's writing. She teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee, as well as poetry-writing workshops in Auvillar, France, for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Packing Light When I said I wanted to
- ["Willie Thomas Sr. and Harold Cash"](https://chapter16.org/willie-thomas-sr/) - The stories of the late Willie Thomas Sr. are what legends are made of. There are two versions of the first and only time Thomas entered a rodeo in Lake Charles, Louisiana, back in the early 1950s. They both end the same way. In one version, it wasn’t until he was in the bucking chute
- [How Much Do We Owe the Dead?](https://chapter16.org/how-much-do-we-owe-the-dead/) - In Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, the owner of an independent bookstore in Minneapolis — also an author named Louise — listens as one of her booksellers, Tookie, describes a troubling phenomenon. Their “most annoying customer,” recently deceased, has been haunting the store. What’s more, she may have been killed by a book. “Books
- [The Courtroom of Fiction](https://chapter16.org/the-courtroom-of-fiction/) - In an age when many find justice elusive, some have resorted to the courtroom of fiction. The Trees by Percival Everett is a prime example of this literary justice, examining an American history of lynching, racism, and police brutality. Everett, a member of the Chattanooga-based Fellowship of Southern Writers, is the award-winning author of more
- [Paradise Lost](https://chapter16.org/paradise-lost-2/) - In Paradise, WV, the new novel by Nashville-based writer and musician Rob Rufus, fallout from the opioid epidemic in West Virginia pervades the narrative. It serves as a backdrop of hopelessness to the unsettling tale of madness and murder Rufus unfolds. The little town of Paradise has definitely seen better days, as sympathetic sheriff’s lieutenant
- [Among the Pollinators](https://chapter16.org/among-the-pollinators/) - I am as native a Tennessean as I am a writer. In me, the origin stories of these two identities are inseparably entwined. I could not hope to parse them if I tried. From the start, the lands of my native state have informed my work as strongly as any other force that I’ve encountered.
- [The First Step to Being Brave](https://chapter16.org/the-first-step-to-being-brave/) - “Not everything is a monster,” admits 10-year-old Essie O’Neill in Chattanooga writer J. Kasper Kramer’s new middle grade novel, The List of Unspeakable Fears. “But some things are. Some things you can look at just once and regret your whole life that you saw them.” It’s 1910 and Essie’s family are immigrants from Ireland, settled
- [Always a Circling Back](https://chapter16.org/always-a-circling-back/) - In a chapter of Jesse Graves’ Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place in which he discusses mid-20th-century Knoxville author James Agee, Graves evokes his own childhood in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, about 40 miles north of Knoxville. “I grew up in a remote, essentially eerie place way out in the country, with no neighbors or lights
- [“The holiday / of catastrophe …”](https://chapter16.org/the-holiday-of-catastrophe/) - 7 The holiday of catastrophe with friends from crestfallen adulthoods re- convening to say love you maybe for the first or last time with such bounded cheer Their bouquets accumulate already sweetly decaying She sobs into the pulse in my neck when they are gone The young invite our envy as the old deserve it
- [Such a Solitary Thing](https://chapter16.org/such-a-solitary-thing/) - “Grief is such a — oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think,” writes Elizabeth Strout in the voice of Lucy Barton, narrator of Strout’s 2016 bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton and a character in Strout’s omnisciently narrated 2017 follow-up, the novel/linked story collection Anything Is Possible.
- [So Much Is Lost](https://chapter16.org/so-much-is-lost/) - “Autism is just as much a part of my son as his blue eyes and long fingers,” writes Nashville recording artist Allison Moorer in her second memoir, I Dream He Talks to Me. “Autism is here with us, here in him, and it isn’t going anywhere.” Just before turning 2, John Henry Earle — Moorer’s
- [The Animal in the Mirror](https://chapter16.org/the-animal-in-the-mirror/) - The first and last essays in Susan Orlean’s book On Animals are about her own love of animals. First as a young person, then as an adult, Orlean surrounded herself with whatever animals she could, from dogs to chickens to cattle. It is a very human tendency, this desire to befriend or at least try
- [A Tale of Two Women](https://chapter16.org/a-tale-of-two-women/) - Addison Armstrong’s debut novel, The Light of Luna Park, is a deft fusion of fiction and the facts about a startling moment in medical history, when a project to save premature infants became an amusement park sideshow. Armstrong, an elementary school teacher in Nashville who graduated from Vanderbilt in 2020, found the inspiration for her
- [Messenger](https://chapter16.org/messenger/) - It’s said that birds are messengers from the spirit world and may even be the physical manifestation of angels. Certainly both are winged: dove as symbol of peace, eagle as power and uplift, hawk for vision and acuity, swan as life mate and transformation, raven and vulture as harbingers of death. Auguries, totems, guardians, guides
- [The Collateral Consequences of Hubris](https://chapter16.org/the-collateral-consequences-of-hubris/) - Midway through Ed Tarkington’s novel The Fortunate Ones is a telling exchange between Vanessa, a 20-something product of new Nashville wealth, and Charlie, the outsider artist who has loved her for years. After shattering him with news of her engagement, Vanessa goes on to correct Charlie’s use of “congratulations,” noting that “best wishes” is the
- [Radical Joy](https://chapter16.org/radical-joy/) - Alice Randall’s fifth novel, Black Bottom Saints, is the fictional last will and testament of a real-life Motor City culture maven, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, who emceed at storied show clubs, wrote a gossip column for the Michigan Chronicle, and founded a beloved school of dance for Detroit’s Black daughters. In the novel, it’s 1968, and
- [Murder Songs and Mountain Secrets](https://chapter16.org/murder-songs-and-mountain-secrets/) - The Ballad of Laurel Springs, the third novel from East Tennessee native Janet Beard, opens in 2019, with 10-year-old Grace assigned to write a family story. When a young aunt tells her that the well-known folk song “Pretty Polly” was actually written about the murder of one their distant ancestors, Grace has her topic —
- [Tennessee Stormwater](https://chapter16.org/tennessee-stormwater/) - The winner of the 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, We Imagined It Was Rain is an immersive debut collection of loosely connected short stories from Tennessee native Andrew Siegrist. Each story functions as a tributary feeding into the same winding river, flooded with legends, evocative imagery, and carefully crafted characters. While set
- [Multiple Souths](https://chapter16.org/multiple-souths/) - In the final pages of Southbound, Anjali Enjeti’s collection of essays on identity, race, and Southern politics, the author poses one simple but thorny question that looms like a ghost over much of the work: “Who am I?” For Enjeti, a Southern writer who inherited an ethnic and racial heritage that spans three continents, the
- [“You, Reader”](https://chapter16.org/you-reader/) - You, Reader So often I dream of the secrets of satellites, and so often I want the moose to step from the shadows and reveal his transgressions, and so often I come to her body as though she were Lookout Mountain, but give me a farmers’ market to park my martyred masks and I will
- [Siblings in Exile](https://chapter16.org/siblings-in-exile/) - From school shootings to toddlers in cages, our historical moment can feel like a Grimm’s fairy tale. It’s no surprise, then, that our leading novelists have often couched their work in a fable-like realism: Think of two recent Pulitzer Prize winners, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which
- [Lucille’s Better Half](https://chapter16.org/lucilles-better-half/) - King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King is touted as the first “full-length and authoritative” biography of the Mississippi Delta-born, Memphis-minted guitar great. It was worth the wait and (at 496 pages) the weight, as author Daniel de Visé has a whole lot of living and a lifetime of blues to
- [The Whole of a Life](https://chapter16.org/the-whole-of-a-life/) - In her vibrant new novel, Dear Ann, Bobbie Ann Mason creates a what-if arc for her heroine. Using a narrative strategy reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s propulsive 2013 novel, Life After Life, Mason imagines the life that might have been for Ann Workman, a graduate student who pursues love and English literature against the turbulent backdrop
- [Empty Children](https://chapter16.org/empty-children/) - The plantation at the center of Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets is named after the owner’s mother, Elizabeth, but the slaves there call it Empty. The metaphorical mileage that Jones gets out of that paradoxical place-name illustrates how the novel accretes meaning. Empty, a Mississippi cotton farm near the Yazoo River, exists in a moral
- [A Right Guy](https://chapter16.org/a-right-guy/) - When a 115-year-old man hears God’s voice late at night, he reasonably expects that the time has come for him to transition to the next world. In the case of Sam Cunningham, the protagonist of Robert Olen Butler’s Late City, God has other plans. In a “mellifluous tenor voice,” God says, “I want you to
- [The Order of Masculinity](https://chapter16.org/the-order-of-masculinity/) - Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome is a Black, gay, coming-of-age memoir. Broome, a screenwriter and poet, recounts his formative years in Ohio and his subsequent escape. “[I] patted myself on the back for surviving small-town Ohio,” he writes. Against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s conservative America, Broome presents scenes of Black
- [Interludes of Fulfillment](https://chapter16.org/interludes-of-fulfillment/) - Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins is a memoir fleshed out via a collection of essays. Weaving popular culture, humor, and Black-woman truths, Perkins explores themes of sexual identity and liberation, desirability, and belonging. While this is her first book of prose, she is also author of a collection
- [“Watching a Woman on the M101 Express”](https://chapter16.org/watching-a-woman-on-the-m101-express/) - Kamilah Aisha Moon has earned fellowships to the Prague Summer Writing Institute; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; Cave Canem; and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Review, jubilat, the Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo, among other journals and anthologies, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A
- [Fresh Soil in Old Territory](https://chapter16.org/fresh-soil-in-old-territory/) - Ron Rash’s new story collection, In the Valley, roams the mountains, coves, farms, and small towns of Western North Carolina — the locus of his formidable body of work. From haunting, short-form meditations on loss to a thrilling novella that revives Serena, Rash’s most indelible antihero, In the Valley offers a distillation of his storytelling
- [Wolves in Shepherd’s Clothing](https://chapter16.org/wolves-in-shepherds-clothing/) - “Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged.” This hopeful aphorism from Albert Camus is one avenue for approaching the breathtakingly thorough and eye-rubbingly sad story Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez tells in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University, casts
- [A Larger Suitcase](https://chapter16.org/a-larger-suitcase/) - Memoirs and biopics about famous musicians follow a common arc. It all starts with a quick summation of the artist’s humble beginnings. Then, there’s the nostalgic depiction of their ascent to stardom followed by a perils-of-fame period. Ultimately, we end with heartwarming scenes of redemption and a comeback tour. Dotted with glamorous anecdotes about famous
- [Feeling No but Saying Yes](https://chapter16.org/feeling-no-but-saying-yes/) - “Most of my clients don’t mind when I lick their tears away. Others want me to roll over and show them my belly,” says Luna, the protagonist of Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s latest middle-grade novel. “It’s all about the client. Reading them and responding. … Each of us has a different hole that needs filling. My
- [Hoop Dreams — and Nightmares](https://chapter16.org/hoop-dreams-and-nightmares/) - In Memphis, you often hear about how basketball brings the city together. Among the cheering throngs at the FedEx Forum, you will find people of all stripes, united in their fervor for the NBA's Grizzlies or the University of Memphis Tigers. But can a sport straddle Memphis' racial divide? In his new book Memphis Hoops,
- [A Pretty Place to Die](https://chapter16.org/a-pretty-place-to-die/) - The hill country of Eastern Kentucky, according to Chris Offutt, is, among other things, “a pretty place to die.” This dry observation at the outset of The Killing Hills, Offutt’s latest literary thriller, marks the discovery of a local woman’s dead body by a curmudgeonly ginseng root hunter — one of the novel’s many curious,
- [Too Big and Too Loud and Too Much](https://chapter16.org/too-big-and-too-loud-and-too-much/) - “It’s a shame you aren’t more like your sister” is a sentiment that’s all too familiar to 17-year-old Moon Fuentez, the protagonist of Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s second YA novel, How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe. Moon has grown accustomed to being unfavorably compared to her sister, Star. Despite being twins, the two
- [Compact, but Planetary](https://chapter16.org/compact-but-planetary/) - In an early chapter of Bewilderment, Richard Powers’ heartbreaking and transcendent new novel, astrobiologist Theo Byrne lies next to his troubled young son, surrounded by ancient mountains, telling stories of interstellar exploration. Under the shelter of a two-person tent, the boy chides him for inventing an impossible detail. Theo reflects, “And we were, we Earthlings.
- [Corruption and Redemption](https://chapter16.org/corruption-and-redemption/) - Wiley Cash, author of A Land More Kind Than Home, This Dark Road to Mercy, and The Last Ballad, returns with his latest offering, the warm and immensely readable When Ghosts Come Home. Set in 1984 in the small North Carolina coastal town of Oak Island, When Ghosts Come Home opens as an early-morning, low-flying
- [Limning the Condition of Loneliness](https://chapter16.org/limning-the-condition-of-loneliness/) - Our Covid quarantines have been a boon to homebodies and loners. We’ve hunkered down with Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, caught up on Endeavour and Mare of Easttown, knitted shawls and puttered around in the basement woodshop. But solitude breeds loneliness and occasionally contempt, as Kristen Radtke explores in her new graphic nonfiction book, Seek You,
- [A Greener Frequency](https://chapter16.org/a-greener-frequency/) - On the opening page of his novel The Overstory, Richard Powers introduces one human character—identified only as “a woman”—and more than a dozen species of trees. Poplars gossip, persimmons bribe, oaks prophesy, hawthorns laugh. Before the human character says a word, the trees speak with a choral insistence: “All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves
- [Hook On](https://chapter16.org/hook-on/) - They are speaking in quiet, respectful tones. My maternal grandmother bends over the bed and strokes the thin pieces of wool that are lined up there. A paper sketch showing leaves in a circle crinkles nearby, and my mother encourages me to come closer. “Do you like these colors?” The question comes down from on
- [Southern Festival of Books Announces Author Lineup for 33rd Annual Event](https://chapter16.org/southern-festival-of-books-announces-author-lineup-for-33rd-annual-event/) - Update: The 2021 Southern Festival of Books is moving to a largely virtual format due to public health concerns. A full list of festival authors and schedule details can be found here. You'll find all of Chapter 16's festival coverage here. The Southern Festival of Books announced tonight the first of its lineup of authors
- ["One Thing I Have Learned"](https://chapter16.org/one-thing-i-have-learned/) - One Thing I Have Learned In country light we walk back slow / — where we once lived and loved. — Al Young When you wake and the dream still sings, when fireside strokes warmth into your
- [Politics for Christians](https://chapter16.org/politics-for-christians/) - A hearty guffaw comes from former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam when he’s asked about the remarkable lack of cynicism in his first book, Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square. Haslam, 62, is a savvy Republican politician who served two terms as mayor of Knoxville, then went on to
- [“Center Hill”](https://chapter16.org/center-hill/) - Center Hill Moon lilt, sloping to shore — tonight the lake is quiet as a glass of water set by the bed. Midnight thirst, throat smoked like straw catching. Matted grass pulsing like tongues underfoot. Are you here? Is it quiet? Can I tell you now, there are bodies sunk in this lake? Let me
- [One of the Healers](https://chapter16.org/one-of-the-healers/) - When Vereen Bell died on Tuesday, August 24, I posted a notice on my Facebook page that read as follows: RIP and homage to Vereen Bell, author of some of the very best books there are on Cormac McCarthy, W.B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell. He was a friend especially to younger members of the Vanderbilt
- [Phil Levine and the Burger Bitch](https://chapter16.org/phil-levine-and-the-burger-bitch/) - About twenty years ago, when poet Philip Levine was Vanderbilt University’s visiting writer, there was a Burger King on 21st Avenue South, at the edge of the college’s magnolia-fringed campus. It had a large parking lot that butted up next to a place called San Antonio Taco Company, where Vanderbilt students line up to buy
- [Getting Off the Mountain](https://chapter16.org/getting-off-the-mountain/) - When Adam Ross joined The Sewanee Review as the esteemed literary journal’s first new editor in more than 40 years, change quickly followed. Ross and his team redesigned the website and added art to the quarterly’s cover. In his first issue, Ross paid homage to the Review’s legacy but warned of the “destructive powers of
- [Danger in the Woods](https://chapter16.org/danger-in-the-woods/) - There’s an ominous sense of dread and mystery that permeates the village of Amity Falls, all masterfully rendered by Erin A. Craig in her second young adult novel, Small Favors. On the surface, life in Amity Falls is simple. The villagers live by a clear set of rules (all conveniently listed by Craig at the
- [Finding L.A.](https://chapter16.org/finding-l-a/) - Author of two bestselling novels, as well as the widely acclaimed memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down, Rosecrans Baldwin turns to nonfiction with an essay collection. In Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles, Baldwin grapples with defining the second largest urban entity in the U.S. The seven chapters
- [The Yawning Gap](https://chapter16.org/the-yawning-gap/) - Rebecca and Mickey, the married couple at the center of Mary Adkins’ novel Palm Beach, think they already know about the lives of the ultra-wealthy. As a journalist, Rebecca specializes in stories that focus on the “massive, yawning gap between the well-to-do and the barely-getting-by.” Mickey, a New York stage actor who supplements his theater
- [Holding On](https://chapter16.org/holding-on/) - It was one of those objects that would probably not fetch more than a dime at a yard sale. The aluminum measuring cup was scuffed from so many years of use and had no value — except to me. That’s why when its handle fell off, my reaction was totally unreasonable. Cradling the dismembered handle
- [Cooking with Umma](https://chapter16.org/cooking-with-umma/) - Comedian and novelist Suzanne Park delivers the laughs with her contemporary romance So We Meet Again, a perfect comfort read for all the foodies and homebodies who love to live (and eat!) vicariously. Jessie Kim did everything right. She was studious in school, paid her dues with internships, and landed a job on Wall Street
- [Taste, Tradition, and a Sense of Place](https://chapter16.org/taste-tradition-and-a-sense-of-place/) - “I once suggested half-seriously that if the South needs a new flag — as it surely does — we could do worse than to use a dancing pig with a knife and fork,” writes cultural commentator John Shelton Reed in his new book, On Barbecue. A Kingsport native who is passionate about the subject, Reed
- [Bad Influencers](https://chapter16.org/bad-influencers/) - In 2011’s The Ranger, Ace Atkins introduced Sheriff Quinn Colson, a cigar-smoking war hero who returns home to fictional Tibbehah County, Mississippi, to find a den of corruption that needs cleaning. He’s still at the job a decade later in The Heathens, the 11th novel in the series. The criminal kingpin Johnny Stagg returns after
- [Spanks for the Memories](https://chapter16.org/spanks-for-the-memories/) - Susan Sontag once called BDSM “the furthest reach of the sexual experience.” As historian Stephen K. Stein shows in his new book, Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States, the sexual community of BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism) has evolved over the past half-century. Its practitioners have
- [Workshop Dispatches](https://chapter16.org/workshop-dispatches/) - The 18 essays in As We Were Saying are gleaned from recent craft talks delivered at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, which is held each summer on the campus of the University of the South. In his introduction to the book, Wyatt Prunty, founding director of the conference, describes the annual gathering as appearing to be
- [Deep Loss and Deep Joy](https://chapter16.org/deep-loss-and-deep-joy/) - “My life is small and simple, but it’s a better one than I ever thought I’d have,” explains Cash Pruitt, protagonist of Jeff Zentner’s fourth novel, In the Wild Light. “I have what I love: my grandparents, the satisfaction of working with my hands to bring a lawn into perfect order, the rhythm of paddling
- [The Elver Eater’s Mother](https://chapter16.org/the-elver-eaters-mother/) - I excused myself to go to the bathroom, rising from the table at a restaurant in San Sebastian, Spain. I had just finished my first-ever dish of angulas, baby eels, properly called elvers. They are a tasty specialty of Basque cuisine and come in a quarter-pound serving of tiny two-inch long animals, which look like
- [Still Running](https://chapter16.org/still-running/) - “Progress never moves in a straight line,” writes Andrew Aydin, a longtime policy advisor to the late Rep. John Lewis, in his afterword to Lewis’ posthumous graphic memoir, Run: Book One. “Too many people did not understand the forces that gathered to attack and weaken the Voting Rights Act almost immediately after its passage.” Aydin
- [Reality Orientation](https://chapter16.org/reality-orientation/) - When Richard Schweid first set out to learn about the nuts and bolts of home-based healthcare jobs in 2017 — resulting in his latest book, The Caring Class: Home Health Aides in Crisis — he could not have predicted that COVID-19 would erupt in a global public health emergency. But our heightened collective attention on
- [An Unbroken Thread](https://chapter16.org/an-unbroken-thread/) - These days especially, we crave mercy, that plenitude both given and received in times of loss and uncertainty. Such benevolence and kindness infuse East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves’ fourth collection, Merciful Days, an expression his mother used often. Despite his many losses — father, brother, a favorite uncle — Graves is rarely alone in his
- [The Second-Chance Ranch](https://chapter16.org/the-second-chance-ranch/) - Midway through Julia Claiborne Johnson’s second novel, Better Luck Next Time, two women show up at a masquerade dance wearing costumes they have stolen from a local college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One is dressed as a fairy, “a gossamer costume” with “glittery wings”; the other wears Bottom’s papier-mâché donkey’s head, “a string
- [The Cost of Healing](https://chapter16.org/the-cost-of-healing/) - Running through the core of Anjali Enjeti’s debut novel, The Parted Earth, is the volatile atmosphere of India’s Partition, a deadly era of violence that tore apart communities and families. Spanning generations and countries, The Parted Earth examines the personal costs of starting over in the face of tragedy, whether those tragedies are intimate losses
- [Costly Redemption](https://chapter16.org/costly-redemption/) - Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart, the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. The writing in these fragments, as always with Gay’s work, was exquisite. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer, and the
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- [Americanaland the Beautiful](https://chapter16.org/americanaland-the-beautiful/) - John Milward’s Americanaland is a book with a sense of place and rhythm. Both are impeccable. The joy of this veteran music writer’s survey of the music that’s come to be called Americana is that he ranges far, digs deep, and dismisses no sound. How else would we meet not only the Carter Family and
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- [One Cure to Heal Them All](https://chapter16.org/one-cure-to-heal-them-all/) - Afraid of being pigeonholed following the success of her 2010 New York Times-bestselling antebellum novel, Wench, Memphis native Dolen Perkins-Valdez had no desire to write another historical novel. Then she read This Republic of Suffering by Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin-Faust. The book chronicles the Civil War’s legacy of death and destruction, and Perkins-Valdez
- [Gatherers at Time’s End](https://chapter16.org/gatherers-at-times-end/) - The First Signal Once, down near the swales where the hay had been doused with rain, and the bales had come undone and lay flat and half-eaten near the barn, my father and I walked out past our acres into a yellow field. It was yellow all year, a heath, and here the wood smoke
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- [Planting Trees Whose Shade We May Never Enjoy](https://chapter16.org/planting-trees-whose-shade-we-may-never-enjoy/) - One recent morning I wasted time on Twitter, scrolling through tweets by prominent writers bemoaning the impossibility of finding time to read. “Book People,” began a New Yorker correspondent, “can you calmly, in detail, explain to me how you read so. many. books.? Do you just skim them? Do you spend nine hours a day
- [Happiness Is a Sad Song](https://chapter16.org/happiness-is-a-sad-song/) - When he was a child, he was often called "the boy with the hundred year old voice." At 82, Dr. Ralph Stanley remains younger than the sound of his singing and continues to travel the world performing for capacity crowds. In Man of Constant Sorrow, Stanley recounts a career spanning six decades and millions of
- ["Lighter"](https://chapter16.org/lighter/) - Blas Falconer is an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University, where he serves as the poetry editor of Zone 3 Magazine and Zone 3 Press. Falconer received his M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He is the author of The Perfect
- [The Comedy of Empathy](https://chapter16.org/the-comedy-of-empathy/) - Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less, is hilarious. Its humor is especially striking when you consider that, with only a few tweaks to the premise, the book might sound like an existential handwringer. On the brink of turning fifty, novelist Arthur Less is traveling around the world to get over heartache. Freddy, Arthur's lover
- [Toward What? Away From What?](https://chapter16.org/toward-what-away-from-what/) - In a recent interview with Chapter 16, Gaylord Brewer talked about writing residencies, particularly “those attendant moments of dislocation, darkness, exhaustion bought and paid for.” He asked, “Why does the weary traveler put him or herself through such travail? Toward what? Away from what?” Toward what? and Away from what? were questions I asked myself
- [The Body as Storyteller](https://chapter16.org/the-body-as-storyteller/) - The birdcage on the cover of Chanelle Benz’s debut story collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, isn’t mere decoration. Many of the characters in these stories are dealing with confinement, physical or social: Benz’s protagonists include an anchorite in an abbey in sixteenth-century England, an enslaved poet in the Antebellum South,
- [Engaging Ontogeny—and Animal Sex](https://chapter16.org/engaging-ontogeny-and-animal-sex/) - Where do babies come from? It may be a child's question, but the answer is far from simple, especially if we consider the baby-making processes of the whole animal kingdom, as Michael Sims does in his companion to the National Geographic Channel's television special of the same name, In the Womb: Animals. It features ultrasound
- [The Choice Either to Wail or Smile](https://chapter16.org/the-choice-either-to-wail-or-smile/) - Best known for his novels set in early-twentieth-century Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux is also a master of the contemporary short story. Signals, his latest collection, is newly out in paperback. Composed of twelve new stories and an additional nine from previous collections, Signals serves both as a remarkable addition to a formidable body of work and
- [Time Travel with McCarthy](https://chapter16.org/time-travel-with-mccarthy/) - In this summer of re-emergence after a long year of isolation and separation, Knoxvillians will have an opportunity to come together for an evening of collective time travel. On July 8 at Lakeshore Park, “Suttree’s Knoxville: A Hymn to the Past in Film & Music” will combine live music, readings from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree,
- [You Get What You Need](https://chapter16.org/you-get-what-you-need/) - In Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, Grammy-nominated folk musician Mary Gauthier unpacks her ideas around “what makes a song matter.” This investigation takes us through Gauthier’s personal narrative as a queer woman, a survivor of addiction, and an artist who reaches deep into the wounds of her childhood to
- [Sex and Other Sins](https://chapter16.org/sex-and-other-sins/) - Some of my earliest memories involve guilt. Coupled with the guilt comes the fear of hell. As soon as I was old enough to know I should be good, I knew I was not. Much of this fear and guilt came from my grandmother, whom I called Meme. I remember seeing the same fear, much
- [Stranded in Time](https://chapter16.org/stranded-in-time/) - “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” said William Faulkner. It’s a sentiment that fairly shouts from the pages of Michael Amos Cody’s A Twilight Reel, a collection of haunting stories — quiet, meditative tales that build to a climax without giving up all of their secrets, leaving the reader to fill in
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- [Rivers Untamed](https://chapter16.org/rivers-untamed/) - The Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Arkansas rivers loom large in American history. Since colonial times, they have served as essential highways for the country’s crops and freight, which is why cities grew along their banks — despite the rivers’ propensity for mighty floods. In Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature
- [Hurry Back!](https://chapter16.org/hurry-back/) - When I was a freshman at Vanderbilt, 18 years old, I heard a rumor that there was a market down on Elliston Place that would sell beer to you, even if you were underage, as long as you were cool about it. It was called the Hurry Back Market, and I was underage. So one
- [Painful Honesty](https://chapter16.org/painful-honesty/) - While the title of R. Marie Griffith’s new collection of essays, Making the World Over: Confronting Racism, Misogyny, and Xenophobia in U.S. History, may be an intimidating mouthful, the book lives up to its ambitious promise: It absolutely confronts. Chattanooga-born Griffith, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in the history of
- [The Story They Long For](https://chapter16.org/the-story-they-long-for/) - Mary Dixie Carter’s suspense-filled debut novel, The Photographer, places us in the mind and world of a successful New York City photographer named Delta Dawn. When we meet our protagonist, she’s on a job for a wealthy couple, Amelia and Fritz Straub, taking photos at their daughter Natalie’s birthday party. Delta, who tells her own
- [Traumas of the Spirit](https://chapter16.org/traumas-of-the-spirit/) - Over the past 120 years, the lands of modern-day Syria and Lebanon have survived upheaval and strife, including the struggles of World War I, French colonial occupation, political coups, and more recent civil wars. In Disturbing Spirits, historian Beverly Tsacoyianis not only explores the politics of mental health in this region of the Middle East,
- [A Good Man in a Nest of Evil](https://chapter16.org/a-good-man-in-a-nest-of-evil/) - The latest book by legendary journalist Curtis Wilkie, When Evil Lived in Laurel, is a true-crime thriller. It immerses readers in the bone-chilling schemes of Mississippi Klansmen in the 1960s and illuminates the heroics of a martyred civil rights activist and a courageous FBI informant. While chronicling the carnage and folly of far-right extremism and
- [Mixing Registers](https://chapter16.org/mixing-registers/) - In The Survival Expo, poet Caki Wilkinson guides us through an exploration of what it means to survive our past without leaving it altogether, observing it from within but also with newfound perspective. From high school exes “who hung moons / in notebook margins truant afternoons,” to the many Elvises of Graceland, the collection is
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- [Nesting](https://chapter16.org/nesting/) - So often the best of intentions go awry. This spring, thinning my garden beds overfull with hellebores, the early- and long-blooming Lenten rose, I accidentally exposed a rabbit’s nest. It was the first I’d ever seen. I gently pulled back the top layer of gray fluff — then the scream. A humanlike scream of innermost
- [Poor, Forked Animals](https://chapter16.org/poor-forked-animals/) - Michael Griffith humbly remarks that his books do not qualify him as a “World Historical Individual,” yet in The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell, he accomplishes a feat that none of the politicians, industrialists, and artists he portrays could pull off: He brings the dead back to life. The book’s conceit appears modest — to
- [All Kinds of Missing, All Kinds of Loss](https://chapter16.org/all-kinds-of-missing-all-kinds-of-loss/) - In Ashley Herring Blake’s third middle-grade novel, Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea, 12-year-old Hazel is always alert and always prepared: “I’d say I’ve probably saved us from at least a few catastrophes, dozens of minor injuries, and myriad everyday annoyances and mishaps,” she boasts. Hazel never leaves the house without her Safety Pack,
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- [Essence](https://chapter16.org/essence/) - Time crawls on a Greyhound. Parker scrawled the words in magic marker on the back of his notebook. He stared at them a moment and fidgeted, looking aimlessly at the rows of empty seats. As always, he had been the first to board, quickly arranging his small space to ready himself for a long ride.
- [COVID Garden Diary](https://chapter16.org/covid-garden-diary/) - “Everything that rises must converge,” writes Flannery O’Connor. True, in my post-white Christmas gardens, the shoulders of ornamental grasses and the hydrangeas’ leaden heads do rise, slowly, from the saturated ground. The rouge of autumn, tawny just days ago, now a sodden sepia — but the flattened Lenten roses bud from the crown, a gladness
- [“No Filter”](https://chapter16.org/no-filter/) - No Filter I remember an early fall and curvy roads on Highway 25. I remember mist and fading trees, a crumbling barn, a slanted house against the mountainside. I took pictures out the window, lens filtered for fog. I remember a sudden storm — torrents, and gusts juddered the Datsun side to side. My windshield
- [The Sucker](https://chapter16.org/the-sucker/) - I was 18 and about to be the first Vargo to leave Detroit for any reason other than war, thanks to a student loan, a Pell grant, and the gift of an academic probation program that gave kids like me one semester to prove our scholarly worth or go back to wherever it was we
- [The Spaces Between People](https://chapter16.org/the-spaces-between-people/) - The titular protagonist of Corey Mesler’s latest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain, is on a downward slide when we meet him. His freelance writing career pays so poorly that he thinks wistfully of his former job at UPS, where “his steady paycheck brought him nice things like food and gas and a beautiful girlfriend”
- [More Than a Footnote](https://chapter16.org/more-than-a-footnote/) - Long before former No Depression magazine editor Kim Ruehl wrote A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School, she noticed a recurring pattern in historical accounts of the training center for labor and civil rights activists founded in Monteagle in 1932. “It was always Myles, Myles, Myles,” she said in a panel discussion
- [“Time Is a Desert of Rain”](https://chapter16.org/time-is-a-desert-of-rain/) - Time Is a Desert of Rain Again the wind and the gray-toned clouds. Again the sun is a broad, bright moon. Again I ache, bruised from winter years. I forget why spring disappoints me. If the body creates tribes of cells charged to manufacture joy, mine have become nomads, following rumors of light. When did
- [You’re Gonna Talk about This Chicken](https://chapter16.org/youre-gonna-talk-about-this-chicken/) - Hot chicken’s creation has become part of Nashville’s mythology, the sort of tale locals can recount with practiced pauses and wry chuckles. It happened like this: Back in the 1930s — or maybe it was the 1920s or perhaps as late as the 1940s or even the 1950s — well, anyway, there was once a
- [Love and Hurt](https://chapter16.org/love-and-hurt/) - On a Thursday night in March, Anne called to tell me that Tag committed suicide. Anne, Tag and I grew up spending our summers in northern Michigan. We’d known each other since we were five years old. When I was fourteen, I had a crush on Tag, but was flushed, paralyzed, mute. In high school,
- [Mother’s Instinct](https://chapter16.org/mothers-instinct/) - Call it what you will — maternal instinct or mother’s intuition — but mothers seem to have a natural ability to know what a child needs and the resolve to ensure those needs are met. When the three-month-old son of Rebecca Gray is apparently switched with another child, she summons that reserve of energy to
- [A Brief Life](https://chapter16.org/a-brief-life/) - “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner famously opined in Requiem for a Nun; and now novelist Maggie O’Farrell — born in Ireland and a resident of Edinburgh — builds on Faulkner’s insight in her audacious, beguiling Hamnet, published last year by Knopf and named one of The New York Times Review’s
- [Must Not Love Dogs](https://chapter16.org/must-not-love-dogs/) - My kids have a great talent for embarrassing me. They’ve been known to point at bellies and ask whether there’s a baby in there. I’ve turned around after a pleasant conversation with a neighbor to find one of my sons peeing in the bushes. Lately, my 4-year-old daughter has found a new way to make
- [The Curvature of the World](https://chapter16.org/the-curvature-of-the-world/) - “I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave,” writes Marian Graves — the aviator at the center of Maggie Shipstead’s ambitious novel Great Circle — in a logbook found at an abandoned weather station in the Antarctic. “I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling
- [“How to Make a Wolf”](https://chapter16.org/how-to-make-a-wolf/) - How to Make a Wolf The dog could smell love in our hands, our eyes, our dozen words. The-things- we-would-not-say would have to wait until they no longer needed us. Chickens roosted in the waiting. When you kissed me in the bright kitchen. When I slid down the wall with your voice in the phone
- [Wherever You Go, There You Are](https://chapter16.org/wherever-you-go-there-you-are/) - Everything should be looking rosy for Noreen, the protagonist of Sheba Karim’s The Marvelous Mirza Girls. She has just graduated from high school and been accepted into college. She has good, understanding friends. She and her mother, Ruby, have a close relationship. She hardly knows her father but is fine with keeping things distant. Still,
- [The Music City?](https://chapter16.org/the-music-city/) - Nashville opened its $623 million, 1.2 million square-foot Music City Center to both fanfare and voices of dissent in May 2013. Its boosters call it a shining monument to the hopes of all who came to the Music City with guitars on their backs and dreams in their hearts. This often-told story of the Music
- [Sweet Songs Never Last Too Long](https://chapter16.org/sweet-songs-never-last-too-long/) - The first time I saw John Prine in concert, it was hard to know what to make of him. As a college student at the University of Kentucky in the late 1970s, a music fan since childhood, I was already a veteran of many concerts, spanning rock to folk to R&B to jazz to church
- [Our Town](https://chapter16.org/our-town/) - When co-editors Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. envisioned I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville’s Social Justice Sites, they had in mind a non-traditional travel guide along the lines of the University of California Press’ A People’s Guide Series. Those guides, edited by three female geographers, tell the lesser-known stories of how most residents actually
- [Empowering People for the Long Haul](https://chapter16.org/empowering-people-for-the-long-haul/) - With Education in Black and White, Stephen Preskill revisits and revives the story of Myles Horton and Tennessee’s Highlander Center. Historians of the civil rights and labor movements have long known about the significance of Highlander, but this lucidly written book means to frame Myles Horton’s story “as an account of an educator, passionately committed
- [Freedom from Delusion](https://chapter16.org/freedom-from-delusion/) - At the silent center of Joan Silber’s new novel, Secrets of Happiness, lies the foundational paradox of Buddhism: The more one struggles to achieve contentment, the further it recedes. To reach lasting peace, one must forgo all attachments to the material world. Among Buddhism’s four noble truths, the freedom from desire is a necessary step
- [“Spring”](https://chapter16.org/spring/) - R.B. Morris is a Knoxville poet and songwriter, solo performer and band leader, and a sometimes-playwright and actor. His books include Early Ires and Keeping the Bees Employed. His most recent album as a solo performer is Rich Mountain Bound. He wrote and acted in The Man Who Lives Here is Loony, a one-man play
- [Interloper, Hunter, Settler](https://chapter16.org/interloper-hunter-settler/) - In May 1769, Daniel Boone and a small party of hunters skirted the base of Cumberland Mountain in Virginia’s southwestern corner, following an ancient buffalo trail known to the trans-Appalachian tribes as Athiamiowee, or the Warrior’s Path. Near the south end of the mountain, the wide path led up a gentle slope to a notch in
- [Magic, Madness, Mystery, Magnificence](https://chapter16.org/magic-madness-mystery-magnificence/) - For a state with relatively few people, Mississippi has produced some of the greatest artists and writers in American history. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores the literary culture of the Magnolia State in all its charms, oppressions, and contradictions. While touring with his readers from the Gulf Coast to the Hill
- [Beyond Catharsis](https://chapter16.org/beyond-catharsis/) - One of my favorite scenes in Stephanie Danler’s memoir, Stray, occurs when Danler is sitting in a writing workshop, sharing the early pages of what would become her bestselling novel, Sweetbitter. A man in her workshop tells her the pages are good but that he hopes the novel won’t be “just a love story.” Danler
- [An Unspoken Language](https://chapter16.org/an-unspoken-language/) - Some books will make you hungry; some will make you want to cook even if you don’t love cooking; and some will make you wish you’d been born in another country — to a culture where sitting around a table with loved ones is the national pastime. Sobremesa: A Memoir of Food and Love in
- [Spinning through Knoxville](https://chapter16.org/spinning-through-knoxville/) - I watch the TikTok videos of a man in Knoxville. He roller skates — backwards — across Market Square plaza, inside and outside the Convention Center, and down Volunteer Landing that snakes parallel to the Tennessee River. He skates down the brightly graffitied Strong Street alley. Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me” plays as he skims
- [When Imagination Takes Flight](https://chapter16.org/when-imagination-takes-flight/) - Hannah Carmona’s newest picture book, Anita and the Dragons, takes readers to the Dominican Republic. We meet Anita, who imagines she is a princess. Bravely, she’s about to face a “dragon” — the airplane that will take her and her family to a “distant land far, far away.” There will be hot water and a
- [“Self-Portrait as Getting Drunk Dialed by God”](https://chapter16.org/self-portrait-as-getting-drunk-dialed-by-god/) - Self-Portrait as Getting Drunk Dialed by God Oh to be shameless as a bachelorette party singing “Friends in Low Places” as they cruise 12 South in a pedal tavern. Maybe it’s the jealousy in me that gives birth to the aftertaste of defiance, whose flavor is not unlike blood, not unlike a Bible opened randomly
- [A Modern Mother’s Surprising Secret](https://chapter16.org/a-modern-mothers-surprising-secret/) - Growing up in the 1970s, Justine Cowan knew her mother had a secret. “That was how I envisioned it — a hidden chamber tucked away in the recesses of my mother’s twisted mind,” she writes in The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames: A Memoir. Uncontainable, the secret “would ooze out like a thick slurry …
- [She Found Ways to Be Fascinating](https://chapter16.org/she-found-ways-to-be-fascinating/) - During an uneasy second date with a much older, probably married man, Phoebe Hayes — the narrator of Natalie Standiford’s novel Astrid Sees All — cringes at how provincial and insignificant she must look to the sophisticated New Yorkers all around her: “I desperately wanted beautiful new clothes, ones like the blonde at the opera
- [Resisting a Truce with the Unknown](https://chapter16.org/resisting-a-truce-with-the-unknown/) - The opening lines of Low Country, a powerful memoir by part-time Nashvillian J. Nicole Jones, reflect a deeply personal tension between the familiar tropes of a Southern Gothic tale and the drive to challenge that tradition. “Once down in the low country I saw the ghost of a woman I knew well,” Jones begins. “Not
- [A Book for Book Nerds](https://chapter16.org/a-book-for-book-nerds/) - The irony was exquisite reading Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence on an iPad using Kindle software. In this history book about books for book nerds, the transition from handwritten to printed books during the Italian Renaissance is detailed. Today, we’re living through the next transition — from print to digital. Vespasiano da Bisticci, called
- [The Full Story](https://chapter16.org/the-full-story/) - Americana artist Brandi Carlile’s slow-burning ballad “The Story” begins, “All of these lines across my face / tell you the story of who I am / So many stories of where I’ve been / and how I got to where I am.” Carlile’s new memoir Broken Horses is a candid, full rendering of those stories
- [Noir Way Out](https://chapter16.org/noir-way-out/) - Willy Vlautin is concerned with America’s working poor. Whether you encounter his writing via his alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, his award-winning fiction, or the film The Motel Life (based on one of his novels), Vlautin delves into the dark underbelly of American cities and sheds light on individuals caught up in the systemic web of
- [Cold Pursuit](https://chapter16.org/cold-pursuit/) - Howling winds, bone-numbing cold, and biting snow and ice are all just inconveniences standing in the way of Jorie’s determined quest to save her sister Brenna from a ruthless raider in Ellie Cypher’s thrilling debut novel, The Girl from Shadow Springs. Cypher braces readers for the harsh road ahead in her first sentence: “The answer
- [Turning Back Evil](https://chapter16.org/turning-back-evil/) - In Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves, Sidney Thompson told the coming-of-age story of an enslaved Arkansan, Bass Reeves, who is pressed into service for the Confederate army. After surviving a major defeat in the Battle of Pea Ridge near the end of the first book, the young sharpshooter escapes his cruel master and crosses
- [Place Justice](https://chapter16.org/place-justice/) - Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin is a researcher, cultural worker, and lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned a Ph.D. in sociology. She’s the co-host of the Black in Appalachia podcast and the founder of a non-profit community space known as The Bottom, named for the historic Black neighborhood and business district in Knoxville.
- [Guiding Us Through Grief](https://chapter16.org/guiding-us-through-grief/) - With over 2.7 million lives lost worldwide in just one year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic — nearly 550,000 in the United States alone — I can think of few poets whose work is more suited to guide us through this overwhelming grief than Edward Hirsch. His two most recent collections, Gabriel (2014) and Stranger
- [Rounding Up the Strays](https://chapter16.org/rounding-up-the-strays/) - With Stray Decorum, his fourth short-story collection, George Singleton has cemented his reputation as one of the country’s finest—and funniest—masters of the short story. The new collection—which includes work originally published in The Atlantic, Oxford American, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and other leading periodicals—brims with stray dogs and stray humans, all looking for a place
- [Dancing to One’s Own Tune](https://chapter16.org/dancing-to-ones-own-tune/) - It was in 2018 that readers met and fell in love with Merci Suárez, the irrepressible protagonist of Meg Medina’s Merci Suárez Changes Gears. The book won Medina countless enthusiastic middle-school fans, as well as the 2019 Newbery Medal. Those devoted young readers will be happy to know that Merci is back. Merci Suárez Can’t
- [The Land of Missing Things](https://chapter16.org/the-land-of-missing-things/) - The odds are stacked against Lucy and Sam. In C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, the siblings, aged 12 and 11, are orphaned in the barren hills of the American West in the aftermath of the gold rush. Their Ma died three years earlier, after which their Ba spirals
- [Waiting in the Dark](https://chapter16.org/waiting-in-the-dark/) - Clay McLeod Chapman has a knack for reimagining past horrors. In his 2019 novel, The Remaking, he turned his eye toward the murder of a mother and daughter who were accused of witchcraft in the early 20th century. Now with Whisper Down the Lane, his captivating and terrifying follow-up, Chapman focuses on two other true-life
- [The Gray Man goes to Berlin, and the movies](https://chapter16.org/the-gray-man-goes-to-berlin-and-the-movies/) - Mark Greaney’s invincible assassin Court Gentry has earned the title of his 10th adventure, Relentless. The series of action thrillers took off in 2009 with The Gray Man, and over the years, the feared and revered ex-CIA agent who can disappear in a crowd has left a trail of bodies in the global ghost world
- [Reconstructing a Western Myth](https://chapter16.org/reconstructing-a-western-myth/) - Near the conclusion of Dennis McCarthy’s The Gospel According to Billy the Kid, that most notorious of outlaws confronts his friend and nemesis Pat Garrett for the last time, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico — only in McCarthy’s account, the meeting occurs not in 1881 but 15 years later, after Billy returns from a sojourn
- [The Blood Was There All Along](https://chapter16.org/the-blood-was-there-all-along/) - “Strange the crevasses racial superiority sinks into — hiding until perhaps years later it is flushed out,” writes retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter in his memoir of the civil rights movement in Alabama, From Preaching to Meddling. “Reminds me how not too many years ago you could murder somebody. Make an awful bloody mess,
- [Calling Evangelicals to Account](https://chapter16.org/calling-evangelicals-to-account/) - When religion and politics, the twin abstractions, seem to come at us with endless, depressing news of fury and failure, it’s easy to want to reach for comforting caricatures in our common American history. Are things really as bad as they seem? The thought of following up on the facts of where we are and
- [Smelly and Sticky and Slimy, Oh My!](https://chapter16.org/smelly-and-sticky-and-slimy-oh-my/) - Ray Bradbury reportedly said, “Touch a scientist and you touch a child.” Few writers today bring that childlike wonder to science as well as Knoxvillian Erika Engelhaupt, whose book Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science captures the love of the gross, the grisly, and the grimy that has set many a young
- [Winnowing](https://chapter16.org/winnowing/) - On November 30, 2020, we sold our house in East Nashville. Now we are embarked on a Great Adventure — driving a Nissan cargo van out to the desert Southwest and then north until we say, “Let’s just go home.” But before we sold the house, I had to winnow the detritus that had piled
- [Whose Hot Chicken Is It Anyway?](https://chapter16.org/whose-hot-chicken-is-it-anyway/) - In the introduction to Hot, Hot Chicken, Rachel Louise Martin marvels that most white Nashvillians of her generation — herself included — grew up knowing nothing about hot chicken, now Nashville’s signature dish and a global phenomenon. She wondered why that was and had a suspicion she knew the answer. The question burned its way
- [Magic, Betrayal, and Destiny](https://chapter16.org/magic-betrayal-and-destiny/) - The Stolen Kingdom, the second young adult fantasy novel by Franklin writer Jillian Boehme, offers an exciting story of magic, betrayal, and destiny. For many years under the Dallowyn dynasty, the kingdom of Perin Faye was a happy, prosperous place to live because the Dallowyns were divinely anointed with magic. But a century ago, this
- [Writers' Work](https://chapter16.org/writers-work/) - If anyone ever had a finger on the pulse of Southern literature, that person is Sonny Brewer. The Alabama native is the author of four acclaimed novels and editor of the series Stories from the Blue Moon Café: Anthologies of Southern Writers. But perhaps his closest connections to the living literature of the South have
- [Portrait of an Activist](https://chapter16.org/portrait-of-an-activist/) - “Today is a beginning,” Lindsey Krinks said in her first rally speech while still an undergraduate at Lipscomb University. “Today we hope to spark a community-wide movement.” In Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets, Krinks documents the awakening of her social conscience, offering gracious but challenging homage to the conservative
- [Being Good Is Not Enough](https://chapter16.org/being-good-is-not-enough/) - In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist John Archibald of The Birmingham News struggles, even anguishes, over the legacy of his father, a United Methodist minister. On a surface level, the book leads the reader to the well-trod conclusion of many a psychotherapy session: Dad wasn’t perfect, but he did the best he
- [Sweet Dreams](https://chapter16.org/sweet-dreams/) - Jessica Young’s latest picture book, I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams, celebrates the parent-child bond, while simultaneously honoring children’s need to spread their wings. “Each evening when the sun has set,” Young writes, “as nighttime casts a starry net, I’ll hitch a ride on moonbeams and meet you in your dreams.” With vivid examples from
- [A Muscular Christian](https://chapter16.org/a-muscular-christian/) - In A Window to Heaven, Patrick Dean chronicles the adventurous life of Hudson Stuck, a Sewanee graduate and Episcopal priest. By turns a cowboy, telegraph lineman, literature professor, master of the Iditarod, bestselling writer, and social activist, Stuck was above all an advocate for the rights and dignity of native Alaskans for much of his
- [The Fallout of Disaster](https://chapter16.org/the-fallout-of-disaster/) - Joy Castro’s clear-eyed view of the world is grounded in hope. “What’s exciting,” she writes, “is the actual work of changing the world into a gentler, fairer, more compassionate place.” Of course, to make those changes, reality must be exposed, and Castro’s writing is fearless. Her literary thrillers, Hell or High Water and Nearer Home,
- [“Before You Told Me”](https://chapter16.org/before-you-told-me/) - Before You Told Me When I was a child in Ohio, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, we used to run tornado drills in school. We hustled into hallways, knelt down against walls. We covered our heads with our innocent hands. At a young age, I understood what to do: avoid windows, find a place
- [A Spiritual Quest](https://chapter16.org/a-spiritual-quest/) - Renowned bassist Victor L. Wooten has played in many styles and collaborations but is perhaps best known for the avant-garde fusion ensemble put together with banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck. His fluid, funky exploitation of an instrument usually relegated to the rhythm section makes it equal partner to Fleck’s own phenomenal playing of an instrument that usually
- [An Old Friend](https://chapter16.org/an-old-friend/) - There was a time when typewriters were considered cold, soulless machines. Then came computers, and our view of typewriters changed. These days they seem quaint, even friendly. Clattering pleasantly, they press ink against paper, forming letters and words in a charmingly old-fashioned way. The letters aren’t perfect; in fact, they’re different on each machine, like
- [Strange Things Happening](https://chapter16.org/strange-things-happening/) - Forget, for a moment, what Faulkner said about “the human heart in conflict with itself” being the only thing worth writing about. Sometimes we need a writer to make us smile, laugh, and otherwise forget, for a moment, all about our hearts in conflict. Sometimes we need a story about a turkey being saddled up
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- [The Fringe of Dream](https://chapter16.org/the-fringe-of-dream/) - Whether she’s performing riotous sets with her band or working side by side with revered literary lights, Patti Smith has forged a role in our arts culture unlike any other. As evidenced by the travels depicted in her most recent memoir, Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith has embodied the nomadic spirit of the public
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- [Life, Breath, and Death](https://chapter16.org/life-breath-and-death/) - “I can’t breathe.” Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America focuses on life, breath, and death, particularly regarding Black bodies. The book is centered around those recently departed — George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade — as well as others now in line for Black sainthood:
- [Staying with the Dream](https://chapter16.org/staying-with-the-dream/) - "There are so many things I can't think about in order to write in the morning," says Casey Peabody, the 31-year-old heroine of Writers & Lovers, Lily King's terrific fifth novel. "I have a pact with myself not to think about money. … I'm like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I'm
- [A Wayfaring Experiment in Democracy](https://chapter16.org/a-wayfaring-experiment-in-democracy/) - There are plenty of reasons to go on seemingly absurd adventures. In Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River, Maryville College professor and nature writer Kim Trevathan makes the reasons for his quixotic quest clear from the start. “It may have been idiotic,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “but I was driven
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- [Nobody Untended](https://chapter16.org/nobody-untended/) - The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus corrals nine ambitious, verbally rich narrative worlds. Though each of these stories takes place in a small community, together they showcase Gurganus’ penchant for attempting to lift the veneer of small-town niceties and expose — through humor or gut-punching drama — the vast terrain of his characters’ interior lives.
- [Power in the Word](https://chapter16.org/power-in-the-word/) - Benjamin Smith doesn’t really believe in the extraordinary young person. You might find this surprising when you know that Smith is the founder and director of Southern Word, a literary and performing arts organization for young people of Tennessee. Students and recent alumni of Southern Word have published books, produced music, given TEDx Talks, been
- [A Long, Strange Trip](https://chapter16.org/a-long-strange-trip/) - In Chang-rae Lee’s sixth novel, My Year Abroad, we meet the 20-year-old narrator, Tiller Bardmon, in the aftermath of some undisclosed overseas trauma, “freshly adrift … smashed to raw bits by circumstances too peculiar to recount.” But recount them he does, in a nearly 500-page thrill ride of a story, with uneasy straightaways and slow
- [Streams of Consciousness](https://chapter16.org/streams-of-consciousness/) - Like Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things that Make Us Who We Are, the second book by travel writer Jedidiah Jenkins, traverses territory both uncharted and familiar, as unique as it is universal: one individual’s search for meaning. In a collection of essays born out of his popular Instagram feed,
- [Empty Gyms](https://chapter16.org/empty-gyms/) - Most basketball is played in empty gyms. If you play, as I did, from youth leagues to middle school to high school — 11 seasons, all told — your practices outnumber games by a margin of hundreds. No fans see the endless lines you run, the torturous defensive slide drills, the shooting routines that rely
- [To Wonder, to Marvel, to Be Astonished](https://chapter16.org/to-wonder-to-marvel-to-be-astonished/) - As the epigraph to her newest project, Kickstart Creativity: 50 Prompted Cards to Spark Inspiration, Nashville writer and educator Bonnie Smith Whitehouse chose this admonishment from poet Mary Oliver: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave
- [Decency at the End of the World](https://chapter16.org/decency-at-the-end-of-the-world/) - David Arnold, a former Nashville resident and the author of the acclaimed YA novels Mosquitoland, The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik, and Kids of Appetite, returns with The Electric Kingdom, an achingly beautiful and timely book that transcends simple classification. Set in post-apocalyptic New England, The Electric Kingdom follows 18-year-old Nico, who lives in an
- [The Energy Hiding in Our Hearts](https://chapter16.org/the-energy-hiding-in-our-hearts/) - In 2015, Robert Gipe introduced Dawn Jewell in Trampoline, an illustrated coming-of-age story about a Kentucky teenager who fights against strip mining in the 1990s. The setting is fictional Canard County, Kentucky — picture Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha thrust upward onto an Appalachian peak — and the characters include Dawn’s extended mountain family. Weedeater, a 2018 sequel,
- [Violence, love, and animals](https://chapter16.org/violence-love-and-animals/) - Colin Dayan’s Animal Quintet, as the title suggests, is an ensemble of short compositions, each with an animal motif. “The Old Gray Mare” makes the well-known folk song the foundation for considering the brutal commodification of living beauty — whether in horses or women. “Goring Beauty” is a disturbing look at the ritual sadism of
- [The Light of Truth](https://chapter16.org/the-light-of-truth/) - Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells offers a fresh, relevant take on the anti-lynching activist, who was born into slavery in 1862, first gained fame as a journalist in Memphis, and spent much of her life in Chicago. Author Michelle Duster, who is Wells’ great-granddaughter, moves beyond traditional
- [Defying the Logic of Love](https://chapter16.org/defying-the-logic-of-love/) - Nathan Elias’ debut work of fiction, The Reincarnations, is billed as a story collection but feels like a coherent whole. The 12 stories feature recurrent characters and incidents described from multiple perspectives. While the settings range south to Florida and west to California, the collection’s home is Toledo, Ohio, where most of the characters spend
- [Legendary Lady](https://chapter16.org/legendary-lady/) - World War II heroine Nancy Wake should be so widely celebrated that whole bevies of schoolgirls dress up as this brave member of the French Resistance for Halloween. It’s a mystery — and a travesty — that she isn’t. But perhaps New York Times bestselling author Ariel Lawhon’s novel Code Name Hélène will finally bring
- [Courting Justice](https://chapter16.org/courting-justice/) - In 1964, journalist Anthony Lewis published Gideon’s Trumpet, which chronicled the Supreme Court case that guaranteed legal representation to any accused criminal. The popular book told a triumphant tale about enlightened lawyers and judges, promoting a liberal ideal. In Free Justice, Vanderbilt University legal historian Sara Mayeux complicates that narrative. Her rich, detailed study spans
- [Live and Let Spy](https://chapter16.org/live-and-let-spy/) - At first glance, Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie is an artist’s origin story — the biography of Louise Fitzhugh, dissident daughter of a powerful Memphis family who disavows the Jim Crow South, finds a new tribe of “successful, creative, pleasure loving, ambitious, knowledgeable lesbians” (as a friend described them) in New York and
- [Home Is a State of Mind](https://chapter16.org/home-is-a-state-of-mind/) - Simon Han’s appropriately titled debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, is a beautifully rendered meditation on what it means to belong — to a family, to a culture, to a particular place and time. But it is also an exquisitely written examination of living between two worlds. At age 6, protagonist Jack Cheng — having
- [Why Merle Haggard Deserves a Nobel Prize](https://chapter16.org/why-merle-haggard-deserves-a-nobel-prize/) - If Peter Guralnick only accomplished rescuing Elvis Presley from the bilious clutches of notorious biographer Albert Goldman, he would have done plenty for American culture. But he’s achieved far more than his epic two-volume biography of Presley, which remains the definitive text on the king of rock and roll nearly three decades after publication. He
- [The Bard of Memphis](https://chapter16.org/the-bard-of-memphis/) - Corey Mesler’s The Adventures of Camel Jeremy Eros follows its titular hero from boyhood in “one of the poorer sections of Frayser, a poorer section of Shelby County, north of the perpetually poor Memphis” to San Francisco’s Summer of Love, literary stardom, and beyond. In the words of the novel’s unnamed narrator, Camel is a
- [Spenser Hits 50](https://chapter16.org/spenser-hits-50/) - Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is the Energizer Bunny of detective fiction: Not only does he keep going and going and going, he keeps besting bad guys and cracking wise. Since the Boston sleuth first appeared in The Godwulf Manuscript, published January 1, 1974, he has charmed and punched his way through 50 books and counting.
- [From Fur Traders to Chart Toppers](https://chapter16.org/from-fur-traders-to-chart-toppers/) - If you’ve lived in Nashville for any time, it’s likely that you’ve heard one of its fur-trading founders lived in a cave. You’ve read that Kris Kristofferson used to tend bar somewhere down on Music Row and that songwriters used to pop by their publishers without appointment, casually writing chart toppers with the country icons
- [Future Farms](https://chapter16.org/future-farms/) - Vanderbilt University Professor Amanda Little delivered the news in her 2019 book The Fate of Food: Our food systems are broken and the climate crisis is rushing them to a conclusion. If we needed more proof that we have to change our ways, the coronavirus is supplying it, as Little says in her TED talk,
- [An Uptick in Fondness for the World](https://chapter16.org/an-uptick-in-fondness-for-the-world/) - In the introduction to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders explains that this book emerged from a course on the 19th-century Russian short story he teaches in Syracuse University’s graduate writing program. The aim of the class is to help students understand “the physics of the form,” the mechanics of constructing
- [This Is How I Saved Myself](https://chapter16.org/this-is-how-i-saved-myself/) - In Tina Turner’s new book, Happiness Becomes You, she advises readers to ask themselves a simple question: “Will I take a step forward, or will I stay where I am now? Your answer to that question,” she insists, “moment by moment, determines your life path.” The 81-year-old Turner, an American entertainment icon whose influence extends
- [Memphis Calling](https://chapter16.org/memphis-calling/) - The title told it all, like some sci-fi B movie of your teenage dreams, with electric guitars for ray guns and aliens who answered to names like Dewey, Furry, and Sputnik: It Came From Memphis. Well, of course it did. Blues, rock and roll, soul. Music that shook the world. But Robert Gordon’s book, originally
- [Write Like I’m Hungry](https://chapter16.org/write-like-im-hungry/) - In recent years, Dolly Parton seems to have appeared in headlines or trending topic lists practically every day — for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps she’s brought Stephen Colbert to tears with her rendition of a traditional folk ballad. Or her philanthropic efforts are yielding a COVID-19 vaccine. Or she’s voicing support for Black Lives
- [Pain, Truth, and Hope](https://chapter16.org/pain-truth-and-hope/) - At the online 2020 YA-hoo Fest — an annual celebration of young adult literature hosted by the Southern Lit Alliance in Chattanooga — Nashville author Jeff Zentner offered his “three rules for writing YA”: Life is hard and filled with pain. You must be truthful, always. There is always hope. I’d say those are pretty
- [The Word Is “Evocative”](https://chapter16.org/the-word-is-evocative/) - “Ever curl up with a good dictionary?” George Carlin used to ask that question, or a version of it, at the beginning of one of his routines about words. Carlin loved words and the often humorous or, in his view, outrageous ways they were used. He riffed on oxymorons, euphemisms, simple absurdities, and, most famously,
- [Astronaut Obsession](https://chapter16.org/astronaut-obsession/) - In Eliana Ramage’s debut novel, To the Moon and Back, Steph Harper is a queer Cherokee girl whose sole ambition is to become the first Cherokee astronaut. Ramage, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, manages a beautiful feat with the book, writing straight into the relentless way women — particularly women whose identities
- [Nightwalking](https://chapter16.org/nightwalking/) - The girl behind me grabs my jacket as we head out the door. A dozen middle school students follow her, their classroom teacher in the rear. We go dark and with voices off, a flashlight tucked into my pocket for backup. Moments ago, still surrounded by the comforts of the visible world, we were standing
- [A Love Letter to Nashville](https://chapter16.org/a-love-letter-to-nashville/) - Indie Darling, the new thriller by Nashville author Lauren Nossett, plumbs a dark side of Music City through a tale about the mysterious disappearance of popular singer-songwriter Sarah Faith-Owens. Protagonist Kelly Winter, the private detective investigating the case, makes for engaging company; she’s a keen observer with a commitment to helping women in danger. She
- [‘Vital Voices’](https://chapter16.org/vital-voices/) - In Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution, author Denise Kiernan explores the roles of everyday women — and men — in the events leading up to and during the Revolutionary War. She surveys a wide range of perspectives, including the experiences of patriots fighting for independence, loyalists struggling
- [Odd Man In](https://chapter16.org/odd-man-in/) - Robyn Hitchcock’s new memoir, Stranded in the Future, is a lot like the pop surrealist’s music — lyrical, jangly, more than a bit weird, and full of wonder. The book follows the Nashville-based British singer-songwriter’s first memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. That was the year Hitchcock turned 14. He
- [The Work of Secrecy](https://chapter16.org/the-work-of-secrecy/) - Growing up I had a cousin named Dimple who lived in Oak Ridge. She was 46 years older than me, the oldest cousin on that side of the family, while I was by far the youngest. Unlike her sister, who pinned her dark hair up in a tight French roll and seemed unapproachably austere, Dimple
- [City of Ghosts](https://chapter16.org/city-of-ghosts/) - Jay McInerney’s latest novel begins on a nostalgic note, a 35th anniversary party held at the Odeon in Manhattan, site of countless binges in his characters’ riotous pasts. See You on the Other Side, the conclusion of a tetralogy about Corrine and Russell Calloway, opens in early 2020 with its central characters turning 60 and
- [Soul Force](https://chapter16.org/soul-force/) - In his last and greatest sermon, on April 3, 1968, at Mason Temple in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. applauded his fellow minister, James Lawson. “He’s been to jail for struggling,” said King. “He’s been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggle. But he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people.”
- [Ink-Stained Elegy](https://chapter16.org/ink-stained-elegy/) - In Come Again No More, David Wesley Williams resurrects the spirit of a dying newsroom with the lyrical gusto of a man both mourning and celebrating his first love. This is a novel about, among other things, the end of an era — the collapse of American newspapers, yes, but also the twilight of a
- [Hearing Voices](https://chapter16.org/hearing-voices/) - “In one week, my life will be different,” muses 17-year-old Stella Bohdan, the narrator of Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s first YA novel, The Spiritualists. “I might be wealthy, I might be on the lam, I might be in jail. But it will be different, at long last. The possibilities are endless, and I can practically taste
- [A Roaring Twenties Mystery in the Motor City](https://chapter16.org/a-roaring-twenties-mystery-in-the-motor-city/) - The year is 1927, the city Detroit, and Marjorie Lennox, youngest daughter of a dirty-dealing automobile family, has been invited to an artist residency, where she’ll supposedly have time, space, and like-minded company to do her work as a fashion designer. Thus begins A Fortune of Sand, the debut adult novel by Ruta Sepetys, whose
- [Making Nashville Home](https://chapter16.org/making-nashville-home/) - It’s easy to get stuck in a neighborhood rut, wearing deep grooves in the paths we take every day to work and school and back. That’s why I was so grateful to read Nashville’s New Americans: Tracing the Journeys of Our Immigrant Neighbors by Sheri Lea Sellmeyer. The book serves as a powerful reminder of
- [The Sanctuary of Becoming](https://chapter16.org/the-sanctuary-of-becoming/) - Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun The poems in Stephanie Niu’s debut collection, I Would Define the Sun, revel in expansive spaces of mystery: the ocean’s vast depths, the unfathomable origins of planets and galaxies, the dark of a mother’s womb. And in each of these settings, the most prized human experience is awe.
- [Broke-Down Blessing](https://chapter16.org/broke-down-blessing/) - In “Coming Back Down,” a poem from Nashville poet Donovan McAbee’s Holy the Body, the speaker reflects on an early encounter with a mesmerizing “storefront church” preacher. He questions why this preacher sought him out from the crowd for a tongues-speaking spell, sending him to the floor as a “lonesome gospel lifted me somewhere.” “Maybe
- [A Family’s Survival](https://chapter16.org/a-familys-survival/) - The brutality of colonialism haunts Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Land. The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Hamnet brings her extraordinary skill for rendering family grief to a sprawling story that crosses several landscapes and spans millennia. Land manages to be both a book of ambitious scope and a humble, quiet story of one
- [All-American Surrealism](https://chapter16.org/all-american-surrealism/) - The period between 1958 and 1964 is usually marked as an interregnum in rock ‘n’ roll history. The careers of the original rockers — Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis — had peaked by 1958, when Presley went into the army and Lewis was enduring his fans’ dismay about his recent
- [Southern Festival of Books Announces Initial Lineup of Authors for 2026](https://chapter16.org/southern-festival-of-books-announces-initial-lineup-of-authors-for-2026/) - Humanities Tennessee, in partnership with Vanderbilt University, today announced the initial lineup of authors who will headline the 38th Annual Southern Festival of Books, taking place October 17-18 at Bicentennial Mall, the Tennessee State Museum, and the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville. One of the oldest and largest literary events in the country,
- [The Legacy of an American Griot](https://chapter16.org/the-legacy-of-an-american-griot/) - Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published in August 1976. In his review for The New York Times, James Baldwin wrote that Haley’s book “suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us.” Fifty years later, Baldwin’s take
- [Teenage Wasteland](https://chapter16.org/teenage-wasteland/) - Early in Christopher Hebert’s novel Delivery, 17-year-old Gabe Sanders declares, “There were two things in the world I loved, baseball and Nell. One had promised to make me famous. The other had said she’d love me back.” Now, both his loves are in danger of slipping away: A mysterious foot injury cost him most of
- [A Complex and Gorgeous Tapestry](https://chapter16.org/a-complex-and-gorgeous-tapestry/) - For many years David George Haskell, whose new book is How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature's Revolutionaries, taught biology at Sewanee: The University of the South before emerging as one of the country’s leading nature writers. (He still teaches occasionally at Emory University near his Atlanta home.) Through a mixture of careful
- [Reckless Awe](https://chapter16.org/reckless-awe/) - Jeff Hardin’s latest poetry collection, Coming into an Inheritance, offers a balm for our chaotic times. These poems convey the grace of nature and power of art, as quick to praise a wren in a dogwood tree as the paintings of Vermeer. They are generous, contemplative works that abound with earned wisdom. In “Since Possibility
- [The Masculinity Gap](https://chapter16.org/the-masculinity-gap/) - The premise of Jordan Ritter Conn’s American Men, to examine the “gap” between “our inherited masculine ideal and the men we actually are,” suggests a study of victimhood. Men feel trapped by impossible cultural expectations (physical dominance, stoicism, sexual attractiveness) and therefore lash out in fits of rage or withdraw into isolated cocoons. But, as
- [Stage Antics and Self-Reckoning](https://chapter16.org/stage-antics-and-self-reckoning/) - It feels unfair to begin a review of Lydi Conklin’s debut novel Songs of No Provenance by saying it won’t be for everyone. But the aspects of the book that may turn off some folks are probably the reasons they should pick it up. It must be said that there’s a lot of pee in
- [Coming Home](https://chapter16.org/coming-home/) - The teenage boys of Hope House, Joe Bond’s debut novel, are walking contradictions. They’re tough but vulnerable, violent but tender. They seek to understand their brittle existence by sharing their life stories, but “nobody’s story came out all at once or even the same way twice.” So says AWOL, the narrator, who adds, “We were
- [Pulling the Loose Thread](https://chapter16.org/pulling-the-loose-thread/) - Boss Brooks belongs firmly in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction canon. It is a decidedly untidy Southern story that is both sensational — a banker fakes his own death using a corpse stolen on a dark winter night — and quietly devastating, especially for the family he left behind. At the center of the book is its namesake,
- [A Fool’s Game?](https://chapter16.org/a-fools-game/) - In her sophomore novel, The Come Apart, Susannah Felts — an influential member of Nashville’s writing community and cofounder of The Porch — explores the paradoxes of pursuing a life in the arts. The book’s protagonist is Maggie Corbin, a singer-songwriter facing a creative and spiritual crossroads: Is a career in music worth the heartache?
- [Royals](https://chapter16.org/royals/) - Probably no two families have captured the public’s attention more than the Kennedys and the Windsors. Older Boomers remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The next generation got up early to watch the fairy-tale wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. There was the public fascination with the sexiest man
- [The Native Tongue of Violence](https://chapter16.org/the-native-tongue-of-violence/) - In 2012, Kevin Powers published his landmark debut novel, The Yellow Birds. A stark, elegiac tale of American soldiers enduring the chaos of the Iraq War, the novel was the PEN/Faulkner Award winner, a National Book Award finalist, and a bestseller. Powers’ intense depiction of combat and camaraderie and his credibility as an Iraq War
- [My Astronaut Father](https://chapter16.org/my-astronaut-father/) - In the summers of my childhood, when riding up and down the driveway on my bike had gotten old, I’d tumble through the house in search of my father. Of our brood, he was the hardest to locate. Mom could usually be found in the closet doing paperwork or in the kitchen painting glassware for
- [Down the Mountain, Into Despair](https://chapter16.org/down-the-mountain-into-despair/) - Tim Johnston teaches in the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis, but he didn’t expect his second novel, Descent, to hit The New York Times bestseller list when it was published in January. Fortunately, this has proven to be strong year for literary thrillers—along with books from writers like M.O. Walsh and David Joy,
- [What Lurks in the Woods](https://chapter16.org/what-lurks-in-the-woods/) - Darby Bozeman’s debut thriller, Summer’s Never Over, turns a lakeside children’s camp in a remote Georgia forest into a backdrop for jump-scares. A black-clad figure campers call the Phantom stalks the grounds at night, windows are smashed, campers go missing. Then the forest goes up in flames, and a popular counselor named Stephanie dies. In
- [Explosive Revelations](https://chapter16.org/explosive-revelations/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on June 24, 2024. *** In the era of the Civil Rights Movement, white supremacists bombed three sites in Nashville: the Hattie Cotton School in 1957, the Jewish Community Center in 1958, and the home of the Black city councilman Z. Alexander Looby in 1960. Betsy
- [Strange Trip](https://chapter16.org/strange-trip/) - Leslie Baird’s debut novel, Salomé, offers a genre-defying tale: a bildungsroman wrapped in layers of gothic mysticism, with a reimagined classic femme fatale. Set in the quiet French village of Châteaubriant, it’s a mind-bendingly good read. Baird, who lived in Nashville for years before moving to Europe, begins the story simply enough: Courtney, an aspiring
- [‘A Beacon of What Is’](https://chapter16.org/a-beacon-of-what-is/) - Lou Turner’s Twin Lead Lines “How does a place become an utterance?” Nashville musician and poet Lou Turner asks in her debut collection, Twin Lead Lines. “How does a home give way to a yell, a cry, — an O?” Circular patterns resonate everywhere in these energetic, formally adventurous poems. The opening poem announces this
- [All Our Unforeseen Lives](https://chapter16.org/all-our-unforeseen-lives/) - Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions Every page of Creekwater Mansions, Ian Hall’s debut collection, takes wild swings. Humor, libido, acrobatics of imagery and diction. These poems disarm and upend assumptions. Yet they do exist in a recognizable lineage. A native of southeastern Kentucky’s coalfields, Hall earned an M.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Evidence of
- [Chance Encounter](https://chapter16.org/chance-encounter/) - While museums are among New York’s crown jewels, I revere one above all others: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which seemingly goes on forever, entire wings devoted to Ming Dynasty scrolls, African sculpture, and a stunning series of European galleries. Ann Patchett pivots off the Met in her subtle, spirited new novel, Whistler, which follows
- [We Hope Again](https://chapter16.org/we-hope-again/) - Think of Jesmyn Ward’s On Witness and Respair as a retrospective. One that, with its stride toward hope, embodies the African principle of sankofa: looking backward to look ahead. In this new collection of essays and speeches, Ward reminds us why she is a preeminent Southern writer. A Mississippian, to be sure, Ward gathers previously
- [Besieged by an Unknown Evil](https://chapter16.org/besieged-by-an-unknown-evil/) - Author Michael Amos Cody blends murder and the supernatural in his new thriller Avalon Moon. Set in Runion, North Carolina, the novel opens with community members worried about an impending snowstorm and the potential danger posed by a new wolf sanctuary on a local island. But their fears shift when the bodies of a missing
- [Under an Imposing Shadow](https://chapter16.org/under-an-imposing-shadow/) - In her debut novel, Mercy Hill, Hannah Thurman stakes out an ambitious emotional and narrative terrain: the fraught interior lives of four sisters raised under the imposing shadow of both a mother and an institution. Set in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Thurman herself is from, and spanning the years 1999 to 2024, the tale unfolds
- [A Tortured Love Story](https://chapter16.org/a-tortured-love-story/) - With a keen sense of place as a driving force in human development, Douglas Stuart ferries readers from the gritty Glasgow tenements of his first two novels — the Booker Prize-winning breakout sensation Shuggie Bain and the Carnegie Medal finalist Young Mungo — to the sprawling, sea-battered Isle of Harris in his engrossing new novel,
- [Rot and Redemption](https://chapter16.org/rot-and-redemption/) - Every place I hike is a graveyard, and each bed I make on the earth is made atop death. Damn it, Walt Whitman. You put me in this mind. It has been my habit as I venture into nature to take a bit of poetry or literature as a companion for the journey. Today my
- ['One Hell of a News Day'](https://chapter16.org/one-hell-of-a-news-day/) - I returned to work on Monday, August 27, determined to expand my credentials as a newsroom leader without overstepping Angus or Henry. Then, fifteen15 days later, on September 11, the unthinkable happened. It began at 7:46 a.m. Memphis time when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center between
- [Small Matters](https://chapter16.org/small-matters/) - The new story collection from Colm Tóibín, a late-career Irish writer whose first novel was published in 1990, offers insight into the author’s current preoccupations and perhaps a glimpse of what’s to come. As The News from Dublin makes clear, Tóibín is grappling with death — how it’s experienced, how it’s grieved, and what it
- [Women on a Mission](https://chapter16.org/women-on-a-mission/) - Ellen Morris Prewitt, a writer with ties to Memphis, Mississippi, and New Orleans, delivers a delightfully rambunctious novel with When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women. As the book begins, we meet Etoile, our narrator and protagonist, walking the streets of New Orleans to grab a quick coffee at one of the local shops. Suddenly, after
- [Ghosts of a Better Life](https://chapter16.org/ghosts-of-a-better-life/) - The world depicted in Patrick Strickland’s debut story collection, A History of Heartache, is thick with undercurrents of personal violence, addiction, cynicism, and economic instability. Jobs are scarce and menial. Drugs are abundant. Parents slosh their wine and whiskey. Kids get high and play too rough. Through his vivid, voice-driven prose, Strickland mingles societal crises
- [This Little Piggy …](https://chapter16.org/this-little-piggy/) - For the last two decades bacon has seemingly been everywhere. And not just in food form. Whether stickers, wrapping paper, socks, perfume, ice cream, or a myriad of other products, bacon as image, scent, and taste pervades the American marketplace. How did this come to be? In his new book, American Bacon: The History of
- ["Bugs Bunny, Postmodern Postmortem"](https://chapter16.org/bugs-bunny-postmodern-postmortem/) - Bugs Bunny, Postmodern Postmortem One day you find a bloody rabbit’s foot some toes still attached. Didn’t Bugs Bunny Have some pun or standing joke on that and the nature of art? How cartoonists Play with their characters’ luck with a slip of the pen or eraser? Bugs was both A postmodernist and an animal
- [A Celebration of Everything Alive and Whole](https://chapter16.org/a-celebration-of-everything-alive-and-whole/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on April 24. 2023 *** In her career as a poet, Ada Limón has been much celebrated. Her 2018 collection, The Carrying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her work has been nominated for the National Book Award and Kingsley Tufts Poetry
- [Writers at Work](https://chapter16.org/writers-at-work/) - I’ve visited the writing spaces of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and other literary heroes, but not because I think it will help my own writing. That seems to be the motivation for some, especially in the aspiring set. That by seeing how the masters did it, to see the chairs in which they parked their
- [London Off the Beaten Path](https://chapter16.org/london-off-the-beaten-path/) - Patrick Radden Keefe turns his significant investigative powers to the death of a con artist in his sixth book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. What begins as an inquiry into a 19-year-old man’s possible murder quickly evolves into what Keefe is best known for: a
- [Loss, Life, and Hope](https://chapter16.org/loss-life-and-hope/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview was originally published on November 12, 2024. *** Poet Christian Collier’s work has appeared in such publications as Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Poetry, and Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. His chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade was a 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City
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- [Death at the Museum](https://chapter16.org/death-at-the-museum/) - Erica Wright, Knoxville resident and author of eight books, including 2024’s Hollow Bones, takes readers to Wyndale, Florida, in her latest whodunit, The Museum of Unusual Occurrence. As novel opens, we meet Alcyone “Aly” Orlean, a 20-something skeptic who runs the oddities museum of the title. Aly has a lot on her plate. In addition
- [On Human Frailty and Corruption](https://chapter16.org/on-human-frailty-and-corruption/) - “There is a lot of human frailty floating around,” observes Nancy Lemann in The Ritz of the Bayou, her account of the 1985 racketeering trial of Edwin Edwards, Louisiana’s colorful, crooked governor, then in his third term. Lemann’s sharp eye for the human frailty at work within a veritable circus of corruption earned the book
- [The Devil in Many Guises](https://chapter16.org/the-devil-in-many-guises/) - From Christopher Marlowe to Goethe to Thomas Mann, writers have gravitated to the Faustian bargain as a narrative device. Now Rickey Fayne reimagines the Mephistophelean myth in his sumptuous novel The Devil Three Times, a multigenerational Black saga that limns the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow South, and even the legend of blues maestro
- [Little Free Library](https://chapter16.org/little-free-library/) - I watched my husband Bo paint the purple letters on the yellow header above the plexiglass door of my new free library. Visions of spines with names like Maya Angelou, Aldo Leopold, Salman Rushdie, and J.D. Salinger danced in my head. The neighbors up and down Devil Fork Road were going to love it —
- [The Gift of the Golden Thread](https://chapter16.org/the-gift-of-the-golden-thread/) - “We wake before sunrise, go to the westernmost point [of the island], and offer our prayer just as dawn breaks,” explains Zaneta Mazza to her young daughter in Bonnie Blaylock’s historical novel, The Water Women. “We greet the sea as it wakes, promising to protect and guard it and the treasure it offers. We harvest
- [Celebrating Minnie](https://chapter16.org/celebrating-minnie/) - In their introduction to Howdy!: The Minnie Pearl Story, authors Mary Ellen Pethel and Don Cusic note the unusual dilemma they faced about what to call their subject. Minnie, with her signature price tag hanging from her straw hat, is famous for decades of country comedy performances at the Grand Ole Opry. But Minnie’s not
- [A World Full of Sadness and Goodness](https://chapter16.org/a-world-full-of-sadness-and-goodness/) - Beginning in 1915, an extended campaign of mass killing and ethnic cleansing was carried out against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, ultimately resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. The years-long massacre would become known as the Armenian Genocide. The lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, first began developing the concept after learning
- [Thinking Of, Feeling With](https://chapter16.org/thinking-of-feeling-with/) - Lovers of literature tend to be devoted to language — the power of verbs, the structure of nouns, the music of adjectives — but too often the humble preposition gets overlooked. Mark Mayer hopes to rectify this injustice. In his new story collection, About, Above, Around: 50 Prepositions (winner of the 2024 George Garrett Fiction
- [Miss Betty’s Week](https://chapter16.org/miss-bettys-week/) - Miss Betty’s column was never supposed to be funny. Still, every Christmas, after making the pilgrimage from Georgia to Water Valley, Mississippi, my sisters and I would read “Betty’s Week” aloud for guaranteed laughter. Scoring a copy of the North Mississippi Herald was a family tradition, right up there with perusing the staff picks at
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- [Deeper, Darker, Further](https://chapter16.org/deeper-darker-further/) - The latest novel by Gin Phillips, Ruby Falls, opens with a brief scene of a corpse in a cavern deep underground in Chattanooga. “He is not alone. … He is a banquet,” the author writes, “and, if he were alive, he would be equally disturbed and pleased. He dislikes — disliked — wastefulness, so it’s
- [The Mascot Chronicles](https://chapter16.org/the-mascot-chronicles/) - Prologue A 7-foot, giant-eyed teddy bear containing a sweat-dripping, middle-aged man. Never in my life had a mirror presented me with such a spectacle. I looked again — in horror and disbelief. Deep within the darkness of the bear’s frozen-open maw blinked a pair of frightened human eyes. “It’s therapeutic,” whispered a furry voice. “It’s
- [Uncle Billy and the Art of Drinking](https://chapter16.org/uncle-billy-and-the-art-of-drinking/) - Mama once asked me, only once, if I loved Uncle Billy. He was her older brother. I said, “Yes.” What I wanted to say was no, not always and not often. There were times when I hated him. For my first 28 years — and for the eight years my mother and father were married
- [Troubled Revolutionary](https://chapter16.org/troubled-revolutionary/) - Gil Scott-Heron’s songs and spoken-word performances, including classics like “Johannesburg,” “Whitey on the Moon,” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” made him America’s poet-prophet in the 1970s. Scott-Heron spoke against injustice with wit, empathy, and justified anger, and he, along with his musical partner, Brian Jackson, had a formative influence on early hip-hop and
- [Snapshots of a City](https://chapter16.org/snapshots-of-a-city/) - Susan Finch’s linked short story collection, Dear Second Husband, takes readers on a layered journey through the lives of Nashvillians facing a range of emotional entanglements and predicaments. With a kaleidoscopic view of a fast-changing city and the fallout on its people, as well as a deep devotion to character development, Finch, an associate dean
- [Glimpses of Vulnerability](https://chapter16.org/glimpses-of-vulnerability/) - There’s a moment near the end of her The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs when author Beth Ann Fennelly describes the impact of artist Rob Townsend's nude portraiture, in which “viewers are compelled to see themselves in the other.” With that phrasing, she’s also describing the empathy-building experience of reading memoir. We are made privy to details
- [A Tale of Two Orphans](https://chapter16.org/a-tale-of-two-orphans/) - Tayari Jones begins her superb new novel Kin with the harrowing start to life for two girls born in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in the 1940s. Vernice is six months old when her parents die in a burst of violence. Annie is just days old when her mother abandons her. She never learns who her father is.
- [Looking Closely at the Weeds](https://chapter16.org/looking-closely-at-the-weeds/) - Whether she’s writing a column for The New York Times or journal entries about the backyard critters she spies from her Nashville home, Margaret Renkl’s nature writing is full of warmth and heart, a beautiful entwining of how the natural world impacts our inner worlds. The founding editor of Chapter 16, Renkl has authored several
- [Art in the Face of Erasure](https://chapter16.org/art-in-the-face-of-erasure/) - Carolyn Newton’s Songs of the Dead Road is a historical novel firmly anchored in time and place, tracing the life of a Polish pianist shaped by the violent currents of 20th-century Europe. Newton, who was born in Athens, Tennessee, and spent part of her childhood in Knoxville, brings a studied, almost archivist’s attention to lived
- [‘A Joy and a Wonder’](https://chapter16.org/a-joy-and-a-wonder/) - In their introduction to Land of Everlasting Hills, a collection of early 20th-century photographs by George Masa and Jim Thompson documenting the Great Smoky Mountains, authors Ren and Helen Davis quote a 1926 essay by Horace Kephart, a writer and outdoorsman who became a passionate advocate for preserving the region’s beauty through the creation of
- [Beyond Monumental Figures](https://chapter16.org/beyond-monumental-figures/) - Back in 2018, when Jarvis R. Givens was researching the book that became I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, he came across a bound set of letters in the Jackson State University archives. All dated 1949, they had been written by African American teachers who described school life in
- [A Haunted Town](https://chapter16.org/a-haunted-town/) - When we meet private investigator Annie Gore, the narrator and protagonist of Archer Sullivan’s The Witch’s Orchard, she’s desperate for work. Her laundry is piling up, her refrigerator is almost empty, and her prized watch, a gift from her uncle, is languishing in a pawn shop. When Max Andrews asks to meet with her, she
- [Medgar, Myrlie, and the Movement](https://chapter16.org/medgar-myrlie-and-the-movement/) - Every year, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis bestows an award for a nonfiction book that best furthers understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement and its legacy. This year’s winner is Joy-Ann Reid’s Medgar and Myrlie, an absorbing history of the struggle for racial justice in Mississippi
- [The Return of the Theological Novel](https://chapter16.org/the-return-of-the-theological-novel/) - By now, Brandon Taylor’s readers expect his novels to coalesce around deep philosophical thought. His latest, Minor Black Figures, follows the way of his oeuvre. But this time, it’s not contemplations on science (as in Real Life) or reflections on dance (as in The Late Americans) that drive the novel forward. In Minor Black Figures,
- [‘When You’re Dead We’ll Cherish You Again’](https://chapter16.org/when-youre-dead-well-cherish-you-again/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on January 7, 2025. *** Near the end of poet Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993, the book’s titular protagonist addresses the “gods of difficult things” and tries to explain her choices. “i’m out there still, foraging / in the threads of the world for a
- [Elevation](https://chapter16.org/elevation/) - I don’t recall exactly how I first discovered George Saunders’ work. I was teaching contemporary American lit, focusing on short stories, and I’m pretty sure I stumbled upon his In Persuasion Nation in the library stacks. Reading those first stories was like jumping into very cold water — bracing, invigorating, somehow fun despite the odd
- [Hell’s Kitchen](https://chapter16.org/hells-kitchen/) - The pleasures of reading W.M. Akers’ new mystery To Kill a Cook are similar to the joys of fine dining, an experience that occupies the heart of this novel. Akers prepares each chapter with subtle flavors and surprising spices, the episodes sequenced to satisfy an array of palates while overturning readers’ preconceived notions of the
- [The Devil Inside Me](https://chapter16.org/the-devil-inside-me/) - Given the boom of the ancestry industry, Americans apparently have a limitless appetite for learning about their lineages. What happens, though, when one discovers a family history filled not with titans of industry or trail-blazing scientists but with knaves and hate-mongers? Jeremy B. Jones faced this dilemma when he stumbled across encoded journals written by
- [Southern Spies](https://chapter16.org/southern-spies/) - With multiple arrests of Americans spying for the Soviet Union and other countries, the press dubbed 1985 “The Year of the Spy.” That’s according to the FBI, which maintains a “Year of the Spy” tribute page with a rogues’ gallery of incarcerated intelligence workers. Ace Atkins sets his sprawling new thriller, Everybody Wants to Rule
- [Mississippi Delta Blues](https://chapter16.org/mississippi-delta-blues/) - In W. Ralph Eubanks’ When It’s Darkness on the Delta, hope and hard times swap verses. But too often the latter carries the tune. It makes for a disconcerting journey into a blues-steeped region perfectly captured by the book’s subtitle: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land. It’s disconcerting by necessity. This isn’t a
- [Word Burglars](https://chapter16.org/word-burglars/) - Plagiarism, Roger Kreuz tells us, is more than a plague spread by lazy or sloppy students. It is an accusation that has bedeviled figures across history: Margaret Mitchell and Mark Twain, Joe Biden and Melania Trump, Helen Keller and Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Putin. In Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer
- [Hard to Pin Down](https://chapter16.org/hard-to-pin-down/) - Jonathan Bernstein’s What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle catches the moment when Nashville music became Americana. Earle was a native of the city, and his story is bound up in its mythology as a place where songs get written by outlaws who live only for their art
- [Drop Me a Lifeline](https://chapter16.org/drop-me-a-lifeline/) - Three Guesses, a novella by Memphian Chris McClain Johnson, offers an epistolary tale of surprising friendship between three very different adults, developed over the course of six years. What begins as a search for the story of a painting by one of the three transforms into spirited, platonic exchanges that enrich each character’s life with
- [The Crossroads](https://chapter16.org/the-crossroads/) - Tom Layward, the hero of Ben Markovits’ novel The Rest of Our Lives, finds himself at a crossroads. The younger of his two children is leaving for college at Carnegie Mellon, a seven-hour drive from their home in New York, so the time has come for Tom to make good on a pledge he made
- [A Burst of Light from the Dark](https://chapter16.org/a-burst-of-light-from-the-dark/) - In a memorable poem from Denton Loving’s collection Feller, two companions walk together alongside a woodland lake. They watch the sky for warblers, while out on the water, “turtles perch like hard-shelled gods.” But as night falls, this bucolic encounter shifts into something richer and more intimate. “We canoe to the deepest part of the
- [Witching Hour](https://chapter16.org/witching-hour/) - Liz Parker’s Witches of Honeysuckle House explores the often harsh and unsavory realities of generational trauma and its reverberations through one family’s relationships as they try to build and maintain intimacy. Parker herself notes that she has complex PTSD, and the book’s dedication reads, “For everyone who can never go home.” In essence, Witches of
- [Finding Holiness](https://chapter16.org/finding-holiness/) - In his foreword to Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. celebrates the writers who contributed to the collection and the way they represent “so many queer Appalachians who manage not only to find truth in the universe after being raised in a world that condemns them but also to find holiness
- [Pop Polymath](https://chapter16.org/pop-polymath/) - It was through a connection in Memphis in late 1980 that I was able to get Alex Chilton on the phone and ask him if I could interview him there over the New Year. He said sure, and we talked for a few minutes about his recent album, Like Flies on Sherbert, which had already
- [A Cure as Vast as the Violence](https://chapter16.org/a-cure-as-vast-as-the-violence/) - In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, celebrated writers Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith attempted what so many of us have struggled to do: process national events that have unleashed an onslaught of dangers and find language to convey our rapidly changing sense of reality. As a response to this fraught moment, Jones and
- [Crow Logos](https://chapter16.org/crow-logos/) - Appalachian literature and surrealism might seem strange bedfellows. Though there are obvious crosspollinations, the anarchic energies and tradition-flouting tendencies of the Surrealist movement are not, on the face of it, a hand-in-glove fit for mainstream Appalachian literature. Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, Knoxvillian Alan May’s fourth full-length collection, beautifully frustrates this train of thought.
- [Going Nuclear](https://chapter16.org/going-nuclear/) - The rural town of Hartsville, Tennessee, was in the news this past September when the Tennessee Valley Authority demolished a 500-foot concrete tube that locals derided as a “used beer can.” In 1973, TVA touted the building of the “world’s largest nuclear plant,” and this large structure was one of its cooling towers. But the
- [Parsing American Education](https://chapter16.org/parsing-american-education/) - Jarvis R. Givens’ American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation begins with a story. On a late spring day in 1899, a woman named Susan McCoy traveled to “Old Goodland,” a school in the Choctaw nation of present-day Oklahoma, to claim her rights before the Dawes Commission — a group established by
- [Rewriting the Footnotes](https://chapter16.org/rewriting-the-footnotes/) - About seven years ago, I began corresponding with an old college friend, a refreshing midlife reconnection that has become a valued and supportive friendship. But something he wrote recently seemed so untrue that I couldn’t help but feel an immediate detachment: “Your husband has given you such an interesting life.” He’s not the first to
- [Love Is the Map](https://chapter16.org/love-is-the-map/) - “I want to go home,” I say to my husband. What I mean is I want to age backwards to 6, to sled with my mother in the parking lot of Joyce Kilmer school outside Boston. I want to relive age 25, to play penny-ante poker with my father in his rent-controlled, bachelor shoebox in
- [The Prayer and Preservation of Bringing Communion to the Sick](https://chapter16.org/the-prayer-and-preservation-of-bringing-communion-to-the-sick/) - In Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia, the young bohemian Anton Jelinek tells a story about bringing communion to dying soldiers in a camp near his village in Prussia during the 1860s Austro-Prussian War. There had been a cholera outbreak in the camp. “All day long our priest go about there to give the sacrament
- [Many Visions of Liberation](https://chapter16.org/many-visions-of-liberation/) - The LGBTQ+ community has always struggled for respect, acceptance, and safety in the face of a hostile society, but the struggle has been marked by courageous, even joyful resistance and resilience. Be Gay, Do Crime surveys the long history of that resistance through a daily catalog of notable events. In this carefully annotated volume, editors
- [I Was a Teenage Voyeur](https://chapter16.org/i-was-a-teenage-voyeur/) - My Nashville adolescence was a time adrift without any clear idea of who or what I wanted to be. The people around me in public high school all seemed like people I wouldn’t want to become, and they seemed to view me in the same light. I worried a lot about what kind of life
- [Who is 'You'? Who is 'I'?](https://chapter16.org/who-is-you-who-is-i/) - Jared Joseph’s new novel, Soft Lighting, has a stark visual design. No illustrations on the front, no catchy blurbs, just the title and author in faded gray against a dark background. The back of the book is equally austere, the only text a quotation from the novel, giving the impression that this novel is all
- [Overcoming Obstacles](https://chapter16.org/overcoming-obstacles/) - The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, known as the "Six Triple Eight," was a predominantly Black unit in the U.S. Women's Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. In February 1945, these women were sent to England to confront a daunting task: sorting and delivering millions of pieces of mail for U.S. troops that had
- [My 12-Step Journey into the Addiction of Journalism](https://chapter16.org/my-12-step-journey-into-the-addiction-of-journalism/) - First I was a preadolescent substitute janitor at a specialty magazine, in a gloomy old three-story house near Vanderbilt where Dad and other men (only men) chronicled the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education and pounded manual typewriters and mostly just wanted me to empty their ashtrays. Second, still too young to drive, I
- [Montana, 1953](https://chapter16.org/montana-1953/) - My love affair with Montana started in the summer of 1953. My parents took my sister, Nancy, and me on the obligatory western road trip. For our family, it was a big deal: it was the first and only time my dad ever took a vacation of more than a week. We packed the station
- ['The Healing Game of Art'](https://chapter16.org/the-healing-game-of-art/) - The task of the artist — that’s everyone deep down — in an age of empire — that’s perhaps every age —is to feel it all and act like it. One thing I can tell you is we’ve got to be free. Because we dwell in mysteries beyond formulation and violence beyond our capacities to
- [What Might Have Been](https://chapter16.org/what-might-have-been/) - “Had I changed us, made us friends, would I have turned his fate?” asks Leah Gavin, the narrator of Sheri Joseph’s new novel, Angels at the Gate. “At a stretch, my best influence could have held no more power than chance. An alteration in plans, a step to the left instead of the right, caused
- [Buried Secrets](https://chapter16.org/buried-secrets-2/) - Dead Man Blues, a crime novel by S.D. House (pen name of bestselling author Silas House), combines a nail-biting whodunit with the tale a man in search of redemption. Set in 1955 in a small town on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, this mystery balances finely tuned twists with a balanced cast of heroes and villains. At
- ['Knocking Apart the Bricks of Slavery'](https://chapter16.org/knocking-apart-the-bricks-of-slavery/) - In his latest book, Tom Zoellner addresses a little-known aspect of the American Civil War and one of the key elements in the destruction of America’s "peculiar institution." The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War describes how classifying escaped enslaved people as "contraband" resulted in hundreds of thousands
- [Grandfather in Black and White](https://chapter16.org/grandfather-in-black-and-white/) - A handsome gentleman with a ready smile, he rejected unkindness to anyone in any circumstance as a viable option. He dressed nattily and never left home without wearing a hat. Although I was only 14 when we lost him in 1963, he imbued me with one of the most constant currents in my life. Perhaps
- [America’s Promise](https://chapter16.org/americas-promise/) - Load in Nine Times is Frank X. Walker’s poetic exploration of American life in the period surrounding the Civil War. In his 12th volume of poetry, Walker marches us through the groundswell of the antebellum period, the war, and the sorrows of Reconstruction. The collection takes Kentucky as its geographical framework, speaking through enslaved mothers,
- [Joseph Washington Vanleer](https://chapter16.org/joseph-washington-vanleer/) - The Promise Land Community in Dickson County, Tennessee, was established after the Civil War by formerly enslaved men and women who sought to establish a new life for themselves and their families in freedom. From the Fiery Furnace to the Promise Land by Serina K. Gilbert and Learotha Williams Jr. chronicles the history of Promise
- [Song of My Songs](https://chapter16.org/song-of-my-songs/) - Daniel Black’s ninth book, Isaac’s Song, is a novel about Black gay becoming in the 1980s. This work lives in the same universe as his 2022 novel Don’t Cry for Me. Like the earlier book, written in epistolary style, Isaac’s Song employs a nontraditional format, constructed around a set of visits with a therapist and
- [Fireworks, at Home and Elsewhere](https://chapter16.org/fireworks-at-home-and-elsewhere/) - Today's young readers, coming of age in a post-9/11 world, should be deeply familiar with a central question of our times: what does it mean to be patriotic, to love—and protect, or protest—one's country? It's one question, among others, that they'll find tenderly explored in Silas House's first young-adult novel, Eli the Good. At the
- [The (Im)Perfect Word](https://chapter16.org/the-imperfect-word/) - Writers are always looking for the perfect word, the perfect sentence. Put a bunch of writers together for a little while and you'll most likely hear one of them declare, "I love that word," in response to something someone has uttered. We are not normal (and don't want to be); we actually discuss our favorite
- [Our Own True Selves](https://chapter16.org/our-own-true-selves/) - “I cannot tell from your name if you are a boy or a girl so I will just write to you like you are a human being.” With this clear-eyed, matter-of-fact statement, readers meet Meena Joshi, half of the pen-pal duo whose letters tell the story of Same Sun Here, a charming book for middle-grade
- [Don't Let This Turn You Mean](https://chapter16.org/dont-let-this-turn-you-mean/) - In the opening of Southernmost by former Harrogate novelist Silas House, evangelical pastor Asher Sharp has begun to strain under the cumulative weight of his own choices. His youthful stance against homosexuality led him to shun his brother, Luke, a decision that haunts him still. Now Asher's evolving beliefs have estranged him from his congregation,
- [Poems for the Timesick](https://chapter16.org/poems-for-the-timesick/) - A brief poem called “Lost Place” appears as the prologue to All These Ghosts, the first full-length poetry collection from former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House. This poem’s speaker approaches the past with a sense of mystery but also insists that this present moment in time be understood. “I recall the wild places, fecund, rich.
- [Bringing up the Dead](https://chapter16.org/bringing-up-the-dead/) - Lorrie Moore’s fourth novel, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, begins six years after the Civil War’s end. Libby, a Union sympathizer and spinster who runs a boardinghouse in the South, writes letters to her sister about a boarder who has quite a bit in common with John Wilkes Booth. Libby is
- ["Moving to Tennessee, 1944"](https://chapter16.org/moving-to-tennessee-1944/) - Moving to Tennessee, 1944 after Mary Morris Goodbye to cousins, grandparents, coal tipple and craggy mountains, smoke from smoldering slag heaps. We have packed the car with pillows, blankets, tucked the dog into his box, called the movers for the couch and chairs. Hello to towering peaks of ancient Cherokee lands, to clear rivers
- [“November Moves In”](https://chapter16.org/november-moves-in/) - Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee with her husband and two cats and two dogs. Her weekly column for the Loudon County News Herald is in its thirty-sixth year. She writes stories for young people, poetry, and novels. The American Library Association included The War at Home on its List of
- ["Darwin's Breath"](https://chapter16.org/darwins-breath/) - Darwin's Breath What tone then for the always ongoing eavesdrop on our souls? ~Jeff Hardin When the sun sinks behind the Cumberland Plateau, fireflies rise like stars, and here, perched in the valley, I think about navigation- how there are only narrow ways out, how mountains loom to the north and west, spires in the
- [Web of Lies](https://chapter16.org/web-of-lies/) - Judging by vibes alone, one might conclude that Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben have little in common. Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media brand and Elle Woods style don’t immediately bring to mind the high-octane thrillers dreamed up by Coben. But between her wildly successful Reese's Book Club and his many bestsellers, there is one thing they
- ["Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox"](https://chapter16.org/bluebird-dreams-of-red-fox/) - Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox And then as the eastern sky colors like the skin of an over-ripened peach, you appear — as if I conjured you — pirouetting under my hemlock perch with your death-kiss-is-beautiful kind of allure — gangly, untamable, too proud — and then you belly-creep home. I know about your fatal
- [Always Stories](https://chapter16.org/always-stories/) - Soon, the green at Bicentennial Mall and spaces inside the Tennessee State Library & Archives and Tennessee State Museum will be swarmed by organisms in maybe the truest of symbiotic relationships: readers and writers. One can’t survive without the other, and the Southern Festival of Books, now in its 37th year, ties together these opposite
- [Report from Chattanooga, Day Two](https://chapter16.org/report-from-chattanooga-day-two/) - April 18, 2011 At the Conference on Southern Literature, the first order of business Friday morning was the induction of Harper Lee into the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and no one was surprised that the guest of honor failed to appear. Wayne Flynt, emeritus professor of history at Auburn University and a close friend of
- [A Duty to Language](https://chapter16.org/a-duty-to-language/) - His books line a shelf at my home, and one of his landscapes hangs on a wall in my living room, and while those tangible objects—permanent in their own perfection—are sources of comfort in this period of loss, the intangible is what I already miss about my friend William Gay: phone calls, conversations, hilarious anecdotes
- [Evolution of an American Poet](https://chapter16.org/evolution-of-an-american-poet/) - A 2009 profile in The Wall Street Journal called Robert Hass a "poetry rock star"—a label that fits, insofar as rock stars enjoy fame and a certain reverence. Thanks to his stint as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995-97 and to his poetry column in The Washington Post, Hass is one of America's best-known living poets.
- [The Ways We Were](https://chapter16.org/the-ways-we-were/) - The possibility of alternate universes poses the ultimate version of the question about the glass being half-full or half-empty. The optimist eagerly explores parallel lives where, with slight changes to history, happiness and prosperity abound; the pessimist knows without looking that everything could be much worse. In Ruben Reyes Jr.’s new novel, Archive of Unknown
- [Lifelong Devotee of the Guitar](https://chapter16.org/lifelong-devotee-of-the-guitar/) - Don Cusic’s Chet Atkins: Mr. Guitar makes the case for the East Tennessee-born musician, producer, and record-label executive as the emblematic guitarist of the 20th century, an era of innovation by guitarists as diverse as Robert Johnson, Elizabeth Cotten, and Jimi Hendrix. Some of the most important music made in the second half of the
- [Musical Pioneers](https://chapter16.org/musical-pioneers/) - Like many of the American musicians who helped create rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, The Everly Brothers were instantly influential, popular almost from the beginning of their careers, and doomed to be misunderstood in the light of 1960s rock. Their country-rock synthesis was partly a product of the technological and songwriting capacities of Nashville,
- [A Prison House of Blame](https://chapter16.org/a-prison-house-of-blame/) - On one level, Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability depicts the manifold ways that AI has disrupted our lives. At work, with friends, and even in our homes, smart machines have altered interpersonal dynamics and revolutionized conceptions of authenticity, selfhood, and community. Holsinger’s characters feel detached from the past and from fundamental truths that guided previous generations.
- [Two Strong Women](https://chapter16.org/two-strong-women/) - Nancy Johnson’s second novel, People of Means, like her debut, The Kindest Lie, juggles two narrative voices beautifully to tell the story of two strong women called to action in ways that threaten to upend all of the successes — personal and professional — they worked so hard to achieve. The novel is a story
- [A Colorful Black-and-White Life](https://chapter16.org/a-colorful-black-and-white-life/) - Throughout his career, rock’n’roll pioneer Roy Orbison remained a figure of mystery. In many ways he was the exact opposite of his peers. Unlike such dynamic performers and personalities as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, Orbison was a shy and private man, known for standing stock-still on stage, his eyes hidden behind
- [Country's First Elvis](https://chapter16.org/countrys-first-elvis/) - Jimmie Rodgers became known as "The Father of Country Music," but as Barry Mazor illustrates in his new book, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, Rodgers was much more than a musical ancestor of The Outlaws. Though his last recording took place over 80 years ago, his influence remains pervasive in popular music and culture. Mazor goes beyond
- [A Sense of Place](https://chapter16.org/a-sense-of-place/) - Sometimes a debut shouts, insisting: “I’m new, I’m here, and I’m something to behold!” Other debuts enter the scene as if they’ve always been there, quietly confident and wondering what took y’all so long to see them. Carrie R. Moore’s debut, Make Your Way Home, is a collection of 11 stories so assured readers might
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- [Friendship and Loss](https://chapter16.org/friendship-and-loss/) - Tom Piazza’s poignant book about the late singer-songwriter John Prine is full of colorful anecdotes about the time the two spent together — a painfully short interlude of friendship that ended abruptly with Prine’s death from Covid in the spring of 2020. Recalling one of their many late-night talk and jam sessions, Piazza remembers: The
- [Soaked in Dread](https://chapter16.org/soaked-in-dread/) - Michael Farris Smith sets his novels in southern Mississippi, but not the one you’re familiar with from maps and GPS. His world, devoid of place names and temporal markers, exists in close proximity to the demon realm. His new novel Lay Your Armor Down opens with an old woman wandering through darkened trees, her mind
- [Creatures of the Underworld](https://chapter16.org/creatures-of-the-underworld/) - Outside of Red Bluff, Mississippi, a valley covered in kudzu hides a century’s worth of dark secrets. After the town’s long slide into economic annihilation, the remaining residents hack away at the thick vines perpetually encroaching on their homes, but a creeping miasma of misery threatens to engulf the community. In this grim setting, the
- [Love Songs for Strangers](https://chapter16.org/love-songs-for-strangers/) - In his latest novel, Songs for Other People’s Weddings, David Levithan delivers an often funny, sometimes sad, but always entertaining story about what it’s like to be a wedding singer. J is a moderately successful Swedish singer-songwriter: “If you live outside of Sweden, it’s unlikely you’ve heard any of his songs on the radio ….
- [An Uncommon Childhood](https://chapter16.org/an-uncommon-childhood/) - There’s a scene in Amanda Uhle’s new memoir, Destroy This House, where the pre-adolescent narrator is navigating a pile of near-empty shampoo bottles and a moldy loofah in the family’s only shower. They’ve just moved from a house with six and a half baths in another city, and her hoarder mom refuses to toss bottles
- [Tough Stuff](https://chapter16.org/tough-stuff/) - Paul Burch assigned himself a difficult and audacious writing task: creating a fictional account of the life of country music legend Jimmie Rodgers through a multitude of voices, including Rodgers’ own. He meets the challenge with his bold novel Meridian Rising. The book opens with an author’s note offering the standard disclaimer for fiction inspired
- [Too Coarse for Poetry](https://chapter16.org/too-coarse-for-poetry/) - The question that animates Tom Piazza’s new novel The Auburn Conference is posed in the opening pages: Is American literature “worthy” of study? The answer may be obvious today, but in 1883, when Mark Twain was considered a popular entertainer and Herman Melville had been forgotten, only a young scholar with a mind filled with
- [The More Masks, the Better](https://chapter16.org/the-more-masks-the-better/) - Like a Delta bluesman, Tom Piazza sings about the United States in terms of love and loss and heartbreak. In his new novel, A Free State, and in previous works, America is a beautiful woman who has hurt you before and will hurt you again, but somehow you can’t keep from loving her. She whispers
- [Along for the Ride](https://chapter16.org/along-for-the-ride/) - Country music personalities used to come with stories. In the day, larger-than-life characters like Grandpa Jones, Mel Tillis, and George Jones left a wake of hilarious, poignant and bawdy tales that Music Row insiders passed around like baseball cards. Of these, none were more often repeated than those involving self-proclaimed "King of Bluegrass" Jimmy Martin,
- [“Smug. Narcissistic. Vaguely Unhinged.”](https://chapter16.org/smug-narcissistic-vaguely-unhinged/) - The jacket copy of Hannah Pittard’s If You Love It, Let It Kill You prepares us for a novel about a novelist whose ex-husband’s debut novel contains an “unflattering” portrait of her. As recursive as that sounds, it undersells the novel’s concentric circles. Her ex-husband’s novel isn’t the first time he has maligned her in
- [Confronting Stereotypes](https://chapter16.org/confronting-stereotypes/) - Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut Universe books are very different from classic masculine-centric science fiction like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Instead of a lone male hero, Kowal’s alternative history series embraces women’s perspectives and shows that collective action and cooperation are essential to successful space travel. Kowal’s fourth and latest book in the Lady
- [Encounter with a Future Killer](https://chapter16.org/encounter-with-a-future-killer/) - Philip trailed behind me, rubber wheels of his skateboard grinding over the fresh asphalt. I can recall the weather: humid, clouded-over, a suggestive Cumberland breeze. He rode a Baker board, Independent trucks, wheel bearings turned loose for added glide on the turns. In other words, it was a real board, something I was incredibly jealous
- [Telling Old Stories in New Ways](https://chapter16.org/telling-old-stories-in-new-ways/) - For years, John T. Edge has been a leading voice in the South, primarily through his role as founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA). At SFA events and in his 2017 The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, Edge focused his attention on the abundance and diversity found in Southern
- [Bon Appetite, Y’all!](https://chapter16.org/bon-appetite-yall/) - Soul Food, the third cookbook by celebrity chef Carla Hall, is still new, with no stains. But the recipes in the book—which draw on Hall’s own family history (she’s a Nashville native), as well as black culinary tradition more generally—have been passed down through Southern kitchens on many food-stained recipe cards. As Hall points out
- [Stuck in the Middle](https://chapter16.org/stuck-in-the-middle/) - Dwight Eisenhower once observed, “The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.” Former Senator Joe Manchin would certainly agree with that sentiment. In his new memoir, Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense, Manchin argues forcefully for compromise, bipartisanship, honesty, and levelheadedness —
- [Fusion Food](https://chapter16.org/fusion-food/) - Once upon a time, when the humble strip of bacon had yet to become a culinary fetish object; when mac and cheese was simply a side item on the meat-and-three menu, and not a concept for modish urban restaurants, a young man named John T. Edge roamed the back roads of the American South in
- [The Joy of Science](https://chapter16.org/the-joy-of-science/) - The Shape of Wonder by eminent scientists Alan Lightman and Martin Rees is an apology in the classical sense, meaning a reasoned defense of an idea. Sadly, the idea that the authors feel called upon to defend is that science can be trusted. The Shape of Wonder is Lightman and Rees’ attempt to counter the
- [Alan Lightman's Dreams](https://chapter16.org/alan-lightmans-dreams/) - Recalling his childhood in 1950s Memphis, Alan Lightman says he was a thoughtful, curious kid. "I was always troubled and awed by the big questions," he says. "Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the meaning of life? How did the universe begin?" From the time he first asked
- [God as an Interesting Character](https://chapter16.org/god-as-an-interesting-character/) - Since he first earned wide acclaim with his 1993 debut novel, Einstein’s Dreams, Memphis native Alan Lightman has been known as a writer concerned with the troubled intersection of rationality and mystery, the place where reason encounters a human truth or experience it cannot explain. It’s a subject for which Lightman is well-suited: although he
- [Light at the End of the Tunnel](https://chapter16.org/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/) - January 7, 2013 M.I.T. professor, astrophysicist, and New York Times-bestselling author Alan Lightman recently spoke to Inside Higher Ed, about the Harpswell Foundation, an organization he founded in 2003 to provide housing and leadership training to young women in Cambodia. The school’s first dorm and training center opened in 2006; a second followed in 2009.
- [Ancient Rememberings](https://chapter16.org/ancient-rememberings/) - 1955. A lady's pink boa flutters and slips through the air. All down the street, Negro janitors shuffle behind horse-drawn white floats and scoop up the piles of manure. I am carried along by the heave of the crowd, smell of the popcorn and hot dogs with chili, the red-faced men sweating dark rings through
- [The Known and the Unknown](https://chapter16.org/the-known-and-the-unknown/) - The intersection of reason and mystery has always been Alan Lightman’s creative territory. In his widely acclaimed novel Einstein’s Dreams, he used the theory of relativity as a lens for examining the human condition, and his most recent book, Mr g, featured none other than God himself as the protagonist; the novel has the deity
- [The Insensible Power of Nature](https://chapter16.org/the-insensible-power-of-nature/) - Alan Lightman is the highly acclaimed author of plays, poems, novels, and essays—and he's working on a memoir about his Memphis childhood—so it is not surprising that the recent run of calamitous weather would inspire him to write a literary meditation on the relationship between human beings and the natural world. But Lightman is also
- [The Allure of the Absolutes](https://chapter16.org/the-allure-of-the-absolutes/) - The mystical border between reason and faith, where rational inquiry yields uncertain answers or no answers at all, is unsettling territory for most of us. When it comes to the age-old questions about mortality and meaning, people tend either to comfort themselves with the doctrinal certainties of religion or to shy away from the issue
- [Idler's Manifesto](https://chapter16.org/idlers-manifesto/) - We love to complain about our hyped-up, continually wired existence. Articles about the loneliness and alienation created by digital addiction are, ironically, an Internet staple, and we're constantly reminded about the dangers of stress and sleep deprivation. But it's rare to find a thoughtful argument promoting the alternative. What's really so great about silence and
- [Fields of Dreams](https://chapter16.org/fields-of-dreams/) - In the first chapter of Alan Lightman’s new novel, Three Flames, Ryna, a middle-aged Cambodian woman, is shopping for dinner in the village market when she spies the former Khmer Rouge cadre who, she believes, executed her father. She follows him, fantasizing about revenge, but she’s ambivalent about doing the deed: “What Ryna wanted was
- [Memory and Forgetting](https://chapter16.org/memory-and-forgetting/) - Wright Thompson’s latest book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, revisits what is often considered the most galvanizing event of the civil rights era: the 1955 murder and mutilation of 14-year-old Emmett Till in rural Sunflower County, Mississippi. Readers may be familiar with the lynching itself, the acquittal of Till’s murderers,
- [Poor, Broken World](https://chapter16.org/poor-broken-world/) - Narrow the Road, the fourth novel from James Wade, opens in a failing cotton farm in Depression-era East Texas. William Carter, 15, has been left in charge of not only the farm, but a bedridden mother dying of a brain tumor. The boy’s father, Thomas, a veteran of the Great War, has been long absent
- [One Big Story](https://chapter16.org/one-big-story/) - In Screening Room, Alan Lightman—already a poet, novelist, playwright, and theoretical physicist—turns to memoir in telling the story of his growing-up years in Memphis during the 1950s and ‘60s. The book centers on the family legacy of Lightman’s grandfather, a movie-palace magnate, and it includes scenes with Memphis luminaries like Elvis and Boss Crump, but
- [“I Can’t Tell a Story”](https://chapter16.org/i-cant-tell-a-story/) - Charles Wright, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner, visited East Tennessee State University on October 25, 2017, to read his poems and meet our students and community here in Johnson City. This had been a dream of mine since I met Charles at the University of Tennessee, when I was a graduate student, and
- [A Certain Way of Living](https://chapter16.org/a-certain-way-of-living/) - To call someone a hothouse flower is to say they are particularly fragile and sensitive. They might need to be sheltered in a controlled environment since suboptimal conditions threaten their ability to thrive — or even to survive. In her debut novel, Hothouse Bloom, Atlanta native Austyn Wohlers complicates the typically pejorative term by choosing
- [From Pickwick Dam to Poet Laureate](https://chapter16.org/from-pickwick-dam-to-poet-laureate/) - Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced yesterday that Charles Wright will serve as the twentieth Poet Laureate of the U.S. Wright will assume his post in the fall of this year, beginning with a reading at the Library on September 25. "Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric," Billington said in
- [A Tennessean’s Way of Seeing](https://chapter16.org/a-tennesseans-way-of-seeing/) - From a distance, the Memphis airport is designed to look like martini glasses hanging above a bar. I went there to pick up Charles Wright the day after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Black Zodiac. He was flying back to Tennessee to give a poetry reading at Union University. It was the
- [An Illuminated Mind](https://chapter16.org/an-illuminated-mind/) - Oblivion Banjo, the new collection from former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright, offers the first comprehensive survey of one of the major bodies of work in American poetry. Wright was born in the West Tennessee community of Pickwick Dam in 1935 and spent most of his childhood in Kingsport. A stint in the U.S. Army
- [All in the Unsaid](https://chapter16.org/all-in-the-unsaid/) - Charles Wright has never been afraid to stare down the great mysteries of life and death. “All things aspire to weightlessness,” he writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Black Zodiac. Soon after, he posits that “If God hurt the way we hurt, / he, too, would be heart-sore, / Disconsolate, unappeasable.” There are many philosophical poets
- [“Tennessee Line”](https://chapter16.org/tennessee-line/) - Charles Wright, the newly appointed U.S Poet Laureate, has won the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin Prize, the American Book Award in Poetry, The Los Angeles Times
- [Metaphysician of Daily Life](https://chapter16.org/metaphysician-of-daily-life/) - After winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 collection, Black Zodiac, poet Charles Wright commented on his discomfort with the limelight: “Well, one wants one’s work to be paid attention to,” he said, “but I hate personal attention. I just want everybody to read the poems.” That attitude of modesty and quiet dedication to his
- [Find the Healers](https://chapter16.org/find-the-healers/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on March 24, 2025. *** Almost two years ago, Yolanda Pierce moved to Nashville to become dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School. This was and is intensely good news. In Dr. Pierce, Nashville is met by an activist scholar who is also an accomplished administrator and a
- [No Science to Explain It](https://chapter16.org/no-science-to-explain-it/) - In The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush, author Susan Gregg Gilmore sets the story of 12-year-old Leonard in rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, 1961. Leonard had his infected left leg amputated after stepping on a piece of glass while wading in the nearby Big Sugar River, and the novel opens as the leg is given the “proper
- [Revisiting a Witch Hunt](https://chapter16.org/revisiting-a-witch-hunt/) - In the preface to Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, Clay Risen states his intention to resist “drawing parallels between the past and the present.” In conversation, that resistance goes by the wayside quickly. “I was struck this summer when [now Vice President] JD Vance was talking about these Haitian immigrants
- [So Old Hollywood](https://chapter16.org/so-old-hollywood/) - A fictionalized version of Alfred Hitchcock appears on the first page of Meg Waite Clayton’s latest novel, setting an appropriately eerie and atmospheric tone. Typewriter Beach revels in the morally gray areas of movies — and of life. In 1957, a young actress is sent to Carmel-by-the-Sea, an idyllic California beach town, but Isabella Giori’s
- [](https://chapter16.org/34966-2/)
- [A Legacy in Bricks and Steel](https://chapter16.org/a-legacy-in-bricks-and-steel/) - A reader gets a straight shot of Cheryl McKissack Daniel’s bravado in the title of her memoir, The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers. The McKissacks’ design and construction work may not cover the entire country, but the family’s building businesses have both a venerable history and a vital
- [Saving the Colonel from the Mythmakers](https://chapter16.org/saving-the-colonel-from-the-mythmakers/) - Facts tend to lose the battle with myths, but Peter Guralnick keeps fighting the good fight for the truth in The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World. As Presley himself said during a June 9, 1972 press conference at Madison Square Garden, “The image is one
- [Infinite Little Island](https://chapter16.org/infinite-little-island/) - Griffin Hurt’s name is a misnomer. The protagonist of Adam Ross’ new novel, Playworld, Griffin has a loving family, attends a tony Manhattan prep school, and, as the star of a television show, possesses distinction among his peers. He’s handsome, talented, and popular; if his grades aren’t stellar, who can blame him? Griffin confronts questions
- [A Long Quest](https://chapter16.org/a-long-quest/) - Charlie Peacock was present at the big bang of Americana music, which occurred in 1999 when producer T Bone Burnett recorded the music for the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? at a famed Nashville studio, Sound Emporium. Peacock observed as David Rawlings and Gillian Welch recorded their parts for the film. Peacock’s analysis of
- [Cracks in the Foundation](https://chapter16.org/cracks-in-the-foundation/) - Nashvillian Phyllis Gobbell’s latest novel, Prodigal, tells the story of a son’s homecoming after a decade in hiding. A single gunshot at the Back Home Market changed everything for the clerk who was shot, the juvenile delinquent who pulled the trigger, and the Baptist preacher’s son who ran away, leaving everything he knew and loved,
- [Author in the Prime of His Life](https://chapter16.org/author-in-the-prime-of-his-life/) - To be a fiction writer from Mississippi is to inherit a literary legacy as heavy as Gulf Coast air in August, one rippling with stories of lives both remarkable and remarkably debauched. Young writers either embrace that legacy or reject it, but readers tend to hope for evidence that this literary mantle is a not
- [](https://chapter16.org/34811-2/)
- [God Is Change](https://chapter16.org/god-is-change/) - World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After is a deeply felt and carefully investigated collection about faith and science by writer, illustrator, and journalist Martha Park, who grew up in Memphis. Catalyzed in part by her progressive Methodist pastor father’s final year in the pulpit, Park explores opposing worldviews within the Christian church and
- [Fierce Protection](https://chapter16.org/fierce-protection/) - “People liked to make all kinds of proclamations about what they would never do. But people did all sorts of things, and never was a very long time, and in his experience, people who said things like that lacked imagination. All it meant was that they hadn’t yet found themselves in a situation where they
- [Managing the Monsters of Childhood](https://chapter16.org/managing-the-monsters-of-childhood/) - In Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s middle-grade novel Werewolf Hamlet, something terrible is happening to Angus Gettlefinger’s 17-year-old brother, Liam. He’s turning into a monster, and Angus doesn’t know why. A fifth grader living in Los Angeles, Angus has braces, plays the trumpet, and loves his basset hound, Renfield; he also has an unusually vivid imagination. He likes
- [How Country Grew Up](https://chapter16.org/how-country-grew-up/) - The conceit of Geoffrey Himes’ In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music, 1968-1985 is that a group of ambitious country and pop musicians found a way to make country even more adult than it had been previously. For Himes — a longtime music journalist with
- [A Parable of Young Womanhood](https://chapter16.org/a-parable-of-young-womanhood/) - Like a Southern summer, Girls with Long Shadows may appear at first glance to be a sweet and easy tale. At a distance, the novel’s main characters — the 19-year-old identical Binderup triplets — resemble archetypal Southern beauties: tall and thin, blonde and blue-eyed. They tend to their grandmother’s golf course in their bikinis, say
- [In the Drink](https://chapter16.org/in-the-drink/) - Hear the name William Faulkner and you think of his work. Short stories like “Barn Burning” or long ones like “The Bear,” such novels as The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! The tangled prose, those thorny truths. And his greatest creation, a small world as real to us as the dirt under our
- [Normal Life Impossible](https://chapter16.org/normal-life-impossible/) - In her new story collection Hellions, Julia Elliott embraces the grotesque, playing with a rich literary tradition and molding it into something wholly her own. These tales teem with supernatural creatures — demons, hags, changelings, and swamp apes — but it’s the humans who are most compelling. Hellions opens with “Bride” in which the nun
- [Learning the Hard Way](https://chapter16.org/learning-the-hard-way/) - The music industry can be a cutthroat business when it comes to recording contracts, shady promoters, and new talent desperate to make it big. It can also be murder. Ezra MacRae learns that the hard way in Streets of Nashville, the new crime thriller from poet, novelist, and songwriter Michael Amos Cody. A dreamer from
- [Ode to Summer Camp](https://chapter16.org/ode-to-summer-camp/) - My mother and grandmother used to drive me to North Carolina every summer for camp where, as memory serves, the squirrels were white, the dawns were dewy, and the threat of lake snakes never did come to fruition. Each morning, the sound of a trumpet would wake us up. Before we could get out of
- [Confessions of the Tree Survey](https://chapter16.org/confessions-of-the-tree-survey/) - We were never good yard people, learning about tree diseases and insect infestations only when it was too late and the county extension agent explained that the magnolia tree was dying. Even as the somber young man spoke what amounted to last rites, the tree continued its pattern of producing oxygen and protecting the birds.
- [Vibing with the Victorians](https://chapter16.org/vibing-with-the-victorians/) - Although I am known as “the Victorian” among my friends, it’s ironic how my love for the period originated. Sure, my mother is British, and I was born in Leicestershire. Sure, my Alabama childhood was punctuated by parcels sent by my grandparents, parcels full of candy and weekly magazines with stories set in the past.
- [‘Some Future Cave Dweller Will Find These Notes’ (1987)](https://chapter16.org/some-future-cave-dweller-will-find-these-notes-1987/) - Once, heading back to Memphis after Christmas break, I sat next to a boy my age on a connecting flight from Minneapolis. We acknowledged each other with a curt nod, buckled in, and sat back in silence. Around the time we reached cruising altitude and flight attendants took to the aisle, I noticed he had
- [Black Socrates](https://chapter16.org/black-socrates/) - The Black intellectual-activist Hubert Harrison espoused a “kaleidoscopic radicalism,” critiquing injustices of all sorts: racial segregation, exploitative capitalism, oppressive colonialism, even sexual convention. In Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, Brian Kwoba highlights how Harrison shaped the political landscape in the early decades of the 20th century, even as he stood at the fringes
- ["Threads"](https://chapter16.org/threads/) - Threads When I say he was a presence in the house where I grew up, I don’t mean as a ghost. My dead grandfather would have had, I think, too much tact to return after the dirt had been shoveled, the limousines parked, the black clothes folded and put away. Still, his spirit inhabited our
- [Volcanic, Universal Inspiration](https://chapter16.org/volcanic-universal-inspiration/) - The semester had just ended in the late summer of 2023, and my wife and I were visiting Mount Rainier National Park. For the first time in a long time, I was able to breathe. I mean, there was some minor trouble due to the high altitude, and there was that moment when I froze
- [American Dreams](https://chapter16.org/american-dreams/) - The iconoclastic Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy once posited that Black intellectual history is best understood as a tug-of-war between optimists and pessimists: those like Dr. King and Barack Obama who preached hope for racial reconciliation and those such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael who eschewed it. (Some pessimists, according to Kennedy, switched sides
- [Peace a Long Time Coming](https://chapter16.org/peace-a-long-time-coming/) - In her memoir Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell finds the path to reconciliation as she follows her father’s footsteps during World War II. When she was 14, Presnell’s father went in for minor surgery and never came out of the hospital. After his funeral, her mother gathered together her three children and told them, “Life
- [July 16, 1944](https://chapter16.org/july-16-1944/) - My father was a curious man. No, not an object of curiosity, though there were times he could make you wonder. He was curious, as in eager to learn about many things. How does that machine work? Why is the universe the way it is? It is a good trait for a scientist, which my
- [What Is Left](https://chapter16.org/what-is-left/) - As scrapbooks go, it is small. Thirty-two cheap paper leaves, each 8 ½ by 12 inches, creating sixty-four pages on which to paste whatever memories the owner wanted preserved. The cover, of only a slightly better grade of paper than the leaves, bears a printed scene titled “Winter Wonderland” that portrays dormant trees, a frozen
- [A Poet of the Heart](https://chapter16.org/a-poet-of-the-heart/) - Arthur Smith came to Knoxville from central California, by way of Houston, Texas, and for more than 30 years he helped poets at the University of Tennessee find the path toward their own voices. He was my professor there when I was an undergraduate in mid-1990s, and then again when he directed my Ph.D. dissertation
- [Big Men on Campus](https://chapter16.org/big-men-on-campus/) - The Washington Post has called the Reveleys “Virginia’s academic dynasty.” Three generations have served as presidents in the state’s institutions of higher education: Taylor Reveley II at Hampden-Sydney College from 1963 to 1977, Taylor Reveley III at William & Mary University from 2008 to 2018, and Taylor Reveley IV at Longwood University since 2013. In
- [“Who Do You Think You Are?”](https://chapter16.org/who-do-you-think-you-are/) - Long before Martha S. Jones wrote The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, she was a young woman worried about her birth certificate. At 19, Jones wanted to study abroad. She’d need a passport, of course, and that meant digging her birth certificate out of the family’s fireproof strongbox tucked in a dark corner
- [Honey and a Ham Sandwich](https://chapter16.org/honey-and-a-ham-sandwich/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on November 17, 2017. *** If I’m ever in the unfortunate position of having to choose my last meal, I will choose a ham sandwich on lightly-toasted Pepperidge Farm bread and a cup of tea with milk and sugar. This is what I ate for lunch
- [A Life in Bookmarks](https://chapter16.org/a-life-in-bookmarks/) - I told a friend about an argument we had in the library while designing some bookmarks. One staff member kept wanting to add information. “We have more information than bookmark,” a frustrated colleague said. “Then make the bookmark bigger,” snapped the annoyed staff member. My friend was more puzzled than amused as I described a
- [To Stand Close and Feel Less Alone](https://chapter16.org/to-stand-close-and-feel-less-alone/) - In Run for the Hills, Sewanee author Kevin Wilson takes readers on an unconventional road trip with four siblings eager to ask some hard questions of their long-lost father. Thirty-two-year-old Madeline “Mad” Hill is stunned when Reuben “Rube” Hill shows up at the organic farm she runs with her mother and announces he is her
- [Missing Cat](https://chapter16.org/missing-cat/) - One of the saddest times of my life was the month Tummywumps, my ginger tabby, went missing. I’d left a window open overnight, and while I dozed, she sliced a hole in the screen and stole away like a jewel thief. She was gone … and I was heartbroken. Tummywumps had always seemed happy, or
- [Busy Dreams](https://chapter16.org/busy-dreams/) - A mother and father find themselves at odds over how to handle their troubled adult son, a relapsed alcoholic they believe may have killed someone during a blackout. A history professor nearing retirement recalls his childhood religiousness and his break with the Catholic Church before visiting an old friend with a terrible secret. A woman
- [It’s All Gone Now](https://chapter16.org/its-all-gone-now/) - A young police officer whose wife has just announced her intention to leave him goes out for a walk and finds himself in an encounter with an unlikely bandit. A semi-closeted gay man meets his much-younger half-sister for the first time since infancy and discovers that his estrangement from their father has caused him to
- [A Timely Reckoning](https://chapter16.org/a-timely-reckoning/) - “Tennessee” is derived from the Cherokee noun Ta-Nas-Ce, “river with a big bend,” which could allude to scores of streams and meanders in the state’s watershed but likely refers to a bend and village along the Little Tennessee River in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and
- [Soulful Dudes](https://chapter16.org/soulful-dudes/) - In the 1990 hip-hop anthem “Fight the Power,” Chuck D of Public Enemy slammed Elvis Presley. Elvis may have been “a hero to most,” but for the militantly conscious rapper, that “sucker” was a “straight-up racist,” lumped with the conservative icon John Wayne. The lyrics evoked the long, complicated debate over Presley’s legacy: Did his
- [Red Horizons](https://chapter16.org/red-horizons/) - In an ever-tilting time of political unrest, ecoclimate crises, and unstable concepts of the future, poet Larry D. Thacker envisions a different world in his latest poetry collection, New Red Words, which is largely narrated from the perspective of a poet who travels to Mars as part of an early colonization effort. The sparse landscape
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- [From the Outskirts](https://chapter16.org/from-the-outskirts/) - In the opening chapter of Ocean Vuong’s new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, we are led deep into the mysterious landscapes of East Gladness, Connecticut. Here, Vuong intimates, layers of decaying human industry and lush vegetation reclaiming the land have fused in some complicated, indelible way. “Yes, it is beautiful here, which is why the
- [“In-Between”](https://chapter16.org/in-between/) - In-Between Too big to simply carry to bed. Too small to wake. That nasty in-between of adolescence where even your parents don’t know how to treat you anymore. So they let you lie half-awake in the back seat of the car, convinced you’ll instinctively rise and follow them inside in a few minutes. When you
- [Praise Song for Near Misses](https://chapter16.org/praise-song-for-near-misses/) - 1992. The window behind the teacher’s desk sits at floor level, relic of a time when this wing of the building was an auditorium and this floor didn’t exist — in those days it was only open space, air flecked with motes of burning dust. Across the hall, my own classroom has exactly this setup:
- [Real Powers](https://chapter16.org/real-powers/) - Nicole Jarvis’ new novel, A Spell for Change, explores what the fantasy genre looks like in a 1920 Appalachian setting. Three young people struggle to find their way in Chatuga, Tennessee. There aren’t many economic or romantic opportunities in this mountain town, but Nora Jo, Kate, and Oliver are determined to make their lives bearable
- [Play That Thing](https://chapter16.org/play-that-thing/) - I have an old manual typewriter in my living room, for the same reason some people have a piano in theirs — I love music. Sometimes I’ll tap the keys as I walk by, a little rat-a-tat of random notes, that song of the typewriter, at once jaunty and stern, and as musical to me
- [A Healing Journey](https://chapter16.org/a-healing-journey/) - My name is Botum and I’m Cambodian. On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers captured Phnom Penh, the capital city of war-torn Cambodia, and began transforming the country into a vast and lethal forced-labor camp. By the time their reign of terror ended in 1979, an estimated one in four Cambodians was dead. My parents
- [Never Leave Us Alone](https://chapter16.org/never-leave-us-alone/) - When I was a teenager, I dreamed about living in New York City and having a cat à la Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I think about that fantasy as I stand in my Tennessee backyard in the middle of the night because my beagle mix Penny has eaten something that disagreed with her
- [Surviving Slavery](https://chapter16.org/surviving-slavery/) - In Red Clay, Charles B. Fancher explores the fraught ties, sometimes intimate but always potentially violent, between enslaved people and plantation owners at the close of the Civil War and the dawn of Reconstruction. Inspired by research into his own family history, Fancher delivers a briskly paced, deftly plotted tale, set on a remote Alabama
- [Lost Causes](https://chapter16.org/lost-causes/) - Two soldiers, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy, die in each other’s tender embrace, with what looks like a kiss. This scene occurs in The Birth of a Nation, a notorious 1915 film by D.W. Griffith that romanticizes the Lost Cause of the South in the Civil War. In Confederate Sympathies, a
- [A Necessary Political Act](https://chapter16.org/a-necessary-political-act/) - Roxane Gay has a lot of opinions. Fortunately for us, she is not afraid to share them. One of our nation’s most eloquent and daring public intellectuals, a writer, editor, professor, and cultural commentator, she has grappled with the larger issues facing society — racism, the rolling back of civil rights, women’s reproductive freedom —
- [Honoring Grief, History, and Family](https://chapter16.org/honoring-grief-history-and-family/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on January 31, 2024. *** Hailing from Indian Creek, Kentucky, Crystal Wilkinson is the author of three works of fiction, a collection of poetry, and now, a culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks. A banquet
- [A Dazzling Writer of Flawed People](https://chapter16.org/a-dazzling-writer-of-flawed-people/) - In a 2024 Q&A with The Guardian, Lorrie Moore makes two bold claims, the first regarding her appreciation for Miranda July’s All Fours: “Well, that’s what fiction is for — flawed but interesting women.” She goes on to assert: “I would never read literature for comfort. I would read literature for transport and for meeting
- [“Temporary Madness”](https://chapter16.org/temporary-madness/) - Temporary Madness Perhaps it was never hers to tell, with no one to tell it to. And so it became this: The early 1930s and she was unmarried, in nursing school, her uniform an apron like a butcher’s, long and white as at the bleached beginning of day, or a curtain drawn at the end.
- [A Colorful Cast of Characters](https://chapter16.org/a-colorful-cast-of-characters/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on March 17, 2017. *** Here’s the get-down-to-business question I can’t shake today: when is a Tennessee theater going to tackle a play by Tennessee playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder? She’s not some newbie or nobody. Her thriller, Fresh Kills, debuted at London’s famed Royal Court Theatre
- [The Comet](https://chapter16.org/the-comet/) - Sometimes when I’m between books I’ll pick up a volume of Mark Twain and reread some of his still relevant brilliance. Works such as “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” “The Danger of Lying in Bed,” or one of the tall tales that made Roughing It one of my favorite volumes. As I read, I think about
- [Smile, Everyone!](https://chapter16.org/smile-everyone/) - The storied American Dream includes an idyllic house with a white picket fence, a straight couple with 2.5 children, perhaps a dog frolicking in the sprinkler in the front yard. It does not usually feature a cheating husband who either comes home smelling of other women’s perfume or arrives with a six-pack of beer he
- [So Many Secrets](https://chapter16.org/so-many-secrets/) - Written entirely in second person, Plum is an immersive and propulsive novel that doesn’t shy away from the viscerality of abuse and its long-term impact on a life. Author Andy Anderegg places the reader in the immediacy of each moment of a young girl named J’s life as she comes of age, leaves home, creates
- [A Game of Pure Chance](https://chapter16.org/a-game-of-pure-chance/) - The opening pages of Jennifer Haigh’s Rabbit Moon raise questions about the nature of the universe. The epigraph from Voltaire suggests that the world is deterministic: “Chance is a word devoid of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.” Yet, in the first scene, a random car accident in Shanghai leaves a young American woman
- [A Mother’s Whisper](https://chapter16.org/a-mothers-whisper/) - Ask anyone what defines Southern literature, and the answer is likely to include the importance of place – the land from which our stories spring. But for years now, I’ve wrestled with how many stories have been excluded from this regional designation, how many people have lived just as fully off the land even as
- [Pain and Pure Beauty](https://chapter16.org/pain-and-pure-beauty/) - Ex-Army CID investigator Mick Hardin is back at it in the Kentucky hills in The Reluctant Sheriff, the fourth installment of Chris Offutt’s popular series. Offutt wastes no time in the opening, as two liquor delivery drivers come across a dead body in the parking lot of a local tavern. This body is only the
- [Looking for Home](https://chapter16.org/looking-for-home/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on October 20, 2023. *** Kelsey Norris’ debut story collection, House Gone Quiet, chronicles characters at a turning point between upheaval and the path of reconciliation. Each of these 10 narratives ends on a note that suggests this isn’t the end of the story. These tales
- [The Scientist’s Dilemma](https://chapter16.org/the-scientists-dilemma/) - “If I want people to listen, I need a Y chromosome,” says Barbara in Claudia Barnett’s short play I Knew She Was Right. Inspired by geneticist Barbara McClintock, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1983, this play is one of six in Barnett’s remarkable collection Aristotle’s Wife, based on unsung women in science.
- [Root, Root, Root for the Home Team](https://chapter16.org/root-root-root-for-the-home-team/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on August 21, 2024. *** Many years ago, I invited Joe B. Scott, a former star on the Memphis Red Sox, to visit my class on U.S. sports history. In his presence, the students marveled. They relished this living, breathing connection to the bygone Negro Leagues.
- [The Best Night of His Life](https://chapter16.org/the-best-night-of-his-life/) - “I’m a baseball player,” 12-year-old Timothy “Pumpsie” Strickland declares. “Baseball is my life.” In Andrea Williams’ new middle-grade novel, Inside the Park, Pumpsie is navigating the ups and downs of life in a household of seven as a sometimes awkward, frequently ignored, and always self-doubting preteen while pursuing his dream of becoming a professional athlete.
- [Color Lines](https://chapter16.org/color-lines/) - Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, begins with a memory of blue: a missing dropped-ceiling tile in her grandmother’s bedroom reveals a glimpse of the room’s original sky-blue paint. “My blue begins here,” she writes, “inside her-our-my home.” Perry’s grandmother, “a nurturer and a stalwart,”
- [Finding a Friend Beneath the Poetree](https://chapter16.org/finding-a-friend-beneath-the-poetree/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on March 21, 2019. *** Can you love a tree so much that it loves you back? Sylvia, the young protagonist of Shauna LaVoy Reynolds’s Poetree, is convinced it’s possible and attaches an original ode to spring around the trunk of her favorite birch. When she
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- [Invincible Language](https://chapter16.org/invincible-language/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on September 18, 2023. ** Major Jackson possesses an almost superhuman ability to see himself and his world clearly. His sixth poetry collection, Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2020, reads like a superhero’s origin story. We see the biographical details of the poet’s life alongside the evolution
- [Sisterhood](https://chapter16.org/sisterhood/) - Bridgett Davis’ memoir Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy is both a tribute to Davis’ extraordinary older sister Rita, who died of lupus in 2000 at the age of 44, and a chronicle of the systemic racism that likely hastened her death. It is also an attempt to answer the
- [Strangers on a Train](https://chapter16.org/strangers-on-a-train/) - An express train traveling from Normandy to Paris was, in 1895, an embodiment of modernity. In Emma Donoghue’s new novel, The Paris Express, the train, touted as the fastest transportation in the world, represents a melding of mechanical and social engineering, an invention that is changing the face of the nation. Though the train is
- [Free for All](https://chapter16.org/free-for-all/) - In On Freedom, Yale historian Timothy Snyder describes going to Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Sitting in the back of a friend’s car, looking over the coast of the Black Sea from Ukraine’s Kherson region, he describes filling the trunk of the car with watermelons gifted by farmers who de-mined their own fields with
- [Walking a Pitch-Dark Road](https://chapter16.org/walking-a-pitch-dark-road/) - In his 1991 autobiography, A Season for Justice, the celebrated civil rights lawyer Morris Dees recounted the courtroom battles and close escapes of his career, with a particular focus on his creative legal strategy to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan. (Full disclosure: I was one of the book’s editors.) As Dees urged in his introduction,
- [The Humanity in Every Person](https://chapter16.org/the-humanity-in-every-person/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on November 3, 2021. *** History can be written in broad strokes, framing narratives with a sweeping hand. This version of history usually constitutes our introduction to a major event like a war: a story with sharp delineations between sides, defined roles for the participants, and
- [Writing a New Life Story](https://chapter16.org/writing-a-new-life-story/) - Author Marianne Richmond is best known for her award-winning children's books. If I Could Keep You Little, Be Brave Little One, and The Gift of an Angel are just a few of her beautifully illustrated books cherished by millions of parents, children, and parents-to-be for nearly three decades. Now she has written a powerful new
- [Family, Memory, and Truth](https://chapter16.org/family-memory-and-truth/) - Florence, the debut poetry collection by Knoxvillian Bess Cooley, is a euphonic meditation on family, memory, and truth that plays with time and form. Florence’s titular poem, which opens the book, guides readers immediately into the epicenter of Cooley’s story: her late grandfather’s dementia. “My grandfather tells me of the bunch of goldenrod / he’s
- [The Long Grasp of War](https://chapter16.org/the-long-grasp-of-war/) - Abraham Lincoln wanted peace, for the war to end. He expressed his desire to “bind up the nation’s wounds” in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865. In a meeting at City Point, Virginia, three weeks later, he urged his generals to “let ‘em up easy” when accepting the anticipated surrender of Confederate military
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- [Ghosts and Strangers](https://chapter16.org/ghosts-and-strangers/) - For a story set amid the darkness and ugliness of World War II, Alice Austen’s 33 Place Brugmann is peculiarly focused on beauty. Set largely in the eponymous Brussels apartment building, this debut novel depicts the struggles of a group of characters for whom art and life are interchangeable. Mere survival doesn’t suffice; they cling
- [](https://chapter16.org/34609-2/)
- [What the Long Poem Says About Me](https://chapter16.org/what-the-long-poem-says-about-me/) - A mysterious poem appearing midway through Tiana Clark’s new collection, Scorched Earth, details an ambiguous imagined encounter in a Nashville bar. A father lurks over a steak he can’t eat while a daughter he’s never met works her shift. But then, abruptly, the scene collapses, dissolving into the poet’s ongoing confusion over how to end
- [Grassroots Revolution](https://chapter16.org/grassroots-revolution/) - There are many tenacious individuals in Elaine Weiss’ Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, but Esau Jenkins is among the most creative. A father and businessman who wanted a better life for himself, his children, and other Black people, Jenkins drove a refurbished school bus carrying neighbors from their homes
- [Worlds Within](https://chapter16.org/worlds-within/) - Patti Callahan Henry’s latest novel, The Story She Left Behind, tackles the tale of a precocious author’s seminal work, the unfinished sequel she left behind, and the mystery that ripples through a family for generations. The Story She Left Behind is told from multiple perspectives. The first chapter is a simple two-page glimpse of the
- [Cobs of Wisdom](https://chapter16.org/cobs-of-wisdom/) - I was sifting through the bins at the pay-by-weight Goodwill when I happened upon a cob of corn. Yes, you heard me right. Between the broken Barbie campers and the punctured tennis racquets and the stuffed animals begging to be loved again, there lay a cob of corn. It was half-nibbled, half-intact. Its kernels hung
- [A Stolen Life](https://chapter16.org/a-stolen-life/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review was originally published on September 5, 2018. *** The young woman and the old man shared clingstone peaches. She brought him a Virginia ham and a ripe watermelon. Once they feasted on a "marvelous mess of blue crabs." When the old man felt like it, he told her
- [An American Literary Life](https://chapter16.org/an-american-literary-life/) - When Jimmy Carter died last December at age 100, the obituaries naturally focused on his presidency, as well as the humanitarian and human rights work that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. His prodigious literary output didn’t get a lot of attention, but as Mark West and Frye Gaillard point out in their introduction to
- ["Information Worker at the End of the World"](https://chapter16.org/information-worker-at-the-end-of-the-world/) - Information Worker at the End of the World When the ship to Mars has already departed, and my wealthiest friends have plots in New Zealand for their children, or have no children, what box do I put my treasure in? I have one waterproof bag that clips at the top. Every month, money drips into
- [On Account of Sex](https://chapter16.org/on-account-of-sex/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In conjunction with Humanities Tennessee's exhibition tour of Voices and Votes: Democracy in America, Chapter 16 is revisiting coverage of notable books on civil rights and the foundations of a democratic society. This review originally appeared on February 27, 2018. *** The long march toward voting rights for women began
- [Laughter in the Face of Despair](https://chapter16.org/laughter-in-the-face-of-despair/) - A scholar of Jewish mysticism, a village idiot, and a beautiful girl walk into a haunted library. Sounds like the beginning of a particularly bad joke, right? With a setup like that, readers might be forgiven for wondering how there could be a coherent punchline. In A Fool’s Kabbalah, Memphis native Steve Stern has generated
- [Black Women Who Changed the World](https://chapter16.org/black-women-who-changed-the-world/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on October 15, 2018. *** Even a seasoned historian might not recognize the names of Amy Ashwood, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Celia Jane Allen, and Amy Jacques Garvey. But as Keisha Blain demonstrates in Set the World on Fire, these women shaped the discourse of black
- [Hometown Literary Hero](https://chapter16.org/hometown-literary-hero/) - Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee is best known for his novels and screenplays, but a new volume from The Works of James Agee series restores his reputation as a poet. Complete Poetry of James Agee includes the writer’s earliest publication, Permit Me Voyage, as well as the scant number of poems that were published in
- [A Deep Enough Grief](https://chapter16.org/a-deep-enough-grief/) - When novelist Geraldine Brooks received the devastating phone call informing her that her husband of more than 30 years, celebrated nonfiction writer Tony Horwitz, had died unexpectedly while on tour for his latest book, she found herself trapped between warring impulses. “I paced the room, feeling the howl forming in my chest,” she writes in
- [Indomitable Spirit](https://chapter16.org/indomitable-spirit/) - Chantha Nguon’s Slow Noodles, released this month in paperback, has been lauded by foodies and book lovers all over the world, landing on Best of 2024 lists by publications like Food & Wine, BookPage, and Elle. This captivating memoir celebrates Nguon’s indomitable spirit as she chronicles her life growing up in Cambodia and her family’s
- [“I Want You Here”](https://chapter16.org/i-want-you-here/) - Marilyn Kallet was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and grew up in New York. She is the author of sixteen books, including Packing Light: New and Selected Poems; Circe, After Hours; and Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard. Kallet directs the creative-writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and she also teaches poetry workshops
- [“Evensong”](https://chapter16.org/evensong/) - Judith Duvall’s poetry and fiction have appeared in three anthologies from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild—Bleeding Hearts, Familiar Landscapes, and A Tapestry of Voices—among other publications. A graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she lives near English Mountain and the shores of Douglas Lake in Jefferson County, Tennessee. Evensong When she drew the bow
- ["Dear J.T."](https://chapter16.org/dear-j-t/) - Dear J.T. Your father was the kind of a man Who wrapped money up in baby blankets Swaddled secrets in bodies Bottled broken hearts in empty cans of Corona. Your father was flicker spit, Doused in water, He burned himself down. Your father was the absence felt at Every baseball game or basketball tryout. He
- [“Bear Witness”](https://chapter16.org/bear-witness/) - Tiana Clark’s debut chapbook, Equilibrium, won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, was published in 2018. Bear Witness after Carrie
- ["Duskdawn"](https://chapter16.org/duskdawn/) - Clay Matthews has published work in The American Poetry Review, Spinning Jenny, Willow Springs, The JournalMuffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (available for free download online from End & Shelf Books). His first full-length collection, Superfecta, was released by Ghost Road Press in 2008, and a second, Runoff, was recently released from BlazeVOX Books.
- [My Friend and Mt. LeConte](https://chapter16.org/my-friend-and-mt-leconte/) - I was in a rut – a big ol’ nasty rut with work, feeling trapped by the mundane day-to-day. That’s when I got the call from my dear friend Leah. She and I worked together for several years at a nonprofit in Nashville. I’ve always enjoyed Leah’s sense of humor, and we have a lot
- [Natural City](https://chapter16.org/natural-city/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on October 28, 2024. *** Nashville Native Orchids: Astonishing Science and Mysterious Folklore, the first book from orchid specialist Soraya Cates Parr, packs an amazing amount of information within its 168 illustrated pages. The first section provides a readable account of orchid science, history, and myth,
- [The Good Fight](https://chapter16.org/the-good-fight-2/) - In the firm hands of Catherine Coleman Flowers, environmental, social, and racial justice aren’t separate strands of work that must be done, but rather parts of a whole that stretches back generations. Her essay collection, Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope, reveals an activist who knows what it takes to get things
- [“Slime Mold”](https://chapter16.org/slime-mold/) - Slime Mold A pulsing blob of gelatin wriggled across my path. Amoeba-like it crept along the forest floor. Scoop it into a glass. Pour it out like water. Plant or animal — resolve the enigma of its existence. It slipped into a wormhole and emerged at the base of a tree to climb upward. I
- [Personal Stakes](https://chapter16.org/personal-stakes/) - Ex-CIA operative Court Gentry’s most personal adventure explodes into bookstores this month with Midnight Black, the 14th book in the Gray Man series from Memphis author Mark Greaney. While Greaney’s books are renowned for their high-stakes political and military-style action, the latest novel is about one thing only: Gentry’s mission to rescue his longtime girlfriend
- [Growing Up Fast](https://chapter16.org/growing-up-fast/) - The first song I ever heard by Lola Kirke was “Monster.” In it, she sings, “No I’m not a monster, just someone who wants to belong.” Now, having read Wild West Village — her self-proclaimed “anti-memoir” — I understand her fear of becoming monstrous, as well as her yearning for belonging. Actor and musician Kirke
- [Lavish Nights and Civil Rights](https://chapter16.org/lavish-nights-and-civil-rights/) - Every year, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis bestows an award for a nonfiction book that best furthers understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement and its legacy. This year’s winner is Tanisha Ford’s Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil
- [Just the Facts](https://chapter16.org/just-the-facts/) - In our increasingly fragmented culture, short stories — discrete, brief, manageable — seem like an ideal form of fiction, especially for those forced to acknowledge their shrinking attention spans. But for me, the inverse feels true. The more fractured the world around me, the more I long for deep, immersive worlds, characters I can invest
- [Hot Collaboration](https://chapter16.org/hot-collaboration/) - The debut romance novel from Tennessee writer Katie Holt, Not in My Book, is a steamy slow burn in which the two main characters write a romance novel together. It can be a risky venture to write a novel about writing a novel, but this one is delightful. After many hilarious stops and starts, the
- [Against the Odds](https://chapter16.org/against-the-odds/) - “I like the word ‘hit,’ its imagery of striking bat against ball for the win, of landing a great idea,” writes Bridgett M. Davis in her compelling new memoir, The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. “It conjures up a hero’s triumph, and my mother is the hero of
- [Safety Without Violence](https://chapter16.org/safety-without-violence/) - I first met Andrew Krinks when he was an undergraduate at Lipscomb University. He was part of a loose community of folks committed to friendship and solidarity with one another despite the fact of incarceration: a mix of students, scholars, lawyers, caged and uncaged. Among them were Cyntoia Brown, Rahim Buford, Harmon Wray, Janet Wolf, Richard
- [Funeral at a Dumpster](https://chapter16.org/funeral-at-a-dumpster/) - Stuff accumulates. That’s sounds like an axiom Aristotle would have written, or should have, though the Greeks of his time weren’t plagued with the material excess characteristic of modern, developed economies. Even people who have been wary of the universal tendency to accumulate stuff and lived a comparatively non-accumulating life are still faced with disposing
- [“Snow Day”](https://chapter16.org/snow-day/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This poem originally appeared on April 3, 2014. *** Snow Day A winter day cannot avoid its snow. Can I accept that I do not belong to myself? On the street at night a flurry of shadows falls across the light. Can I think that I will not be? My
- [The Way Forward](https://chapter16.org/the-way-forward/) - In a 1957 speech delivered in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?’” Memphis-born storyteller Alice Faye Duncan has made it her life’s mission to carry out King’s words through her transcendent work as a children's author, educator, and librarian. In a
- [Latin Lessons](https://chapter16.org/latin-lessons/) - In the recent presidential election, immigration across the Mexican border was a hot-button issue. In Immigration, Policy and the People of Latin America, Bryce Ashby and Michael LaRosa seek to understand migration into the United States from the perspective of Latin Americans. Combining history, policy, and personal profiles of migrants, they illuminate the diverse experiences
- [An American Original](https://chapter16.org/an-american-original/) - Carl Perkins is an unexpected choice of subject for the prolific musician biographer Jeff Apter, who lays out the life of the atypically modest rock star in Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly. Apter credits No One Here Gets Out Alive, the scandalous biography about supreme hedonist Jim Morrison of The Doors, as his first
- [Dangerous People](https://chapter16.org/dangerous-people/) - “Tell me … what’s your passion?” a formidable, far-older woman once asked me. Formidable, far-older women are always asking me things. I was sitting at the bar of a subpar pub. On the stool next to me sat a glittering heap of rouge and jewels which proved to be a woman of advanced years. She
- [Employed by Truth](https://chapter16.org/employed-by-truth/) - Since she first gained attention in the late 1960s with fiery poems like "The Great Pax Whitie," Nikki Giovanni has been one of America's most popular poets. She has published more than a dozen books of poetry and another dozen titles for children, along with diverse works of criticism, social commentary, and memoir. She also
- [Abundant Goodness](https://chapter16.org/abundant-goodness/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on April 25, 2024. *** It’s a common experience: walk into an unfamiliar place and a familiar scent transports you back in time. Perhaps it’s to your grandmother’s kitchen as she taught you to make biscuits or maybe to your first apartment, the tiny one over
- [Making and Remaking](https://chapter16.org/making-and-remaking/) - William Woolfitt’s new poetry collection, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go, pays homage to generations of his people in mine-riddled West Virginia. This vein is rich, calling forth his powers of language, lyric, and witness, and he follows a lineage of activist writers who both protest and grieve for the devastation of their
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- ["In Praise of Winter Trees"](https://chapter16.org/in-praise-of-winter-trees/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Bill Brown (1948-2023), a prolific poet and beloved teacher, was a native of Dyersburg, Tennessee. This poem from his 2008 collection, Late Winter, originally appeared on November 19, 2009. *** In Praise of Winter Trees A closed heart can't greet a winter sky. Even a rain puddle is filled by
- [Blood Oranges](https://chapter16.org/blood-oranges/) - Christmas, again. And again, oranges. Not as precious as those of childhood, filling the toe of my stocking, along with the rattle of knobby walnuts and Brazil nuts, almonds and pecans — when most of the year oranges were scarce as hen’s teeth, my grandmothers would say, appearing in December like heavenly orbs. Moving often
- [The Vanishing Birds](https://chapter16.org/the-vanishing-birds/) - Birds are vanishing from our skies, blasted headlines from the September 22, 2019, edition of the Sunday New York Times. Twenty-nine percent fewer North American birds than 50 years before, a loss of 2.9 billion. And not just bald eagles and California condors. Robins, blue jays, Baltimore orioles. Grassland birds, wetland birds. Over 500 species
- [“Star Epiphany”](https://chapter16.org/star-epiphany/) - Star Epiphany What is it besides mid-autumn’s impending cold that so invites the gathering of wood, the building of fires? What about a season’s first nose-full of campfire ignites that ancient memory of cave huddling? What deeply seeded shift wakes us near the center, tempts us tiptoeing away from firelight and warmth, from the safety
- [The Edge of Breath](https://chapter16.org/the-edge-of-breath/) - In her new poetry collection Winter Sharp with Apples, Annette Sisson centers the ordinary joys and sorrows of life. It’s a monumental task to record dailiness, those stretches of time that might be unremarkable if not for somebody gesturing toward them, making us look. And Sisson does so with a sharp eye, never missing a
- [“There Is a Snake”](https://chapter16.org/there-is-a-snake/) - There Is a Snake This isn’t a metaphor. And I’m not the snake. He was really there, then slithered into the short grass, under the bushes that to him must’ve been enormous, good cover, then into the small forest where I couldn’t see him. So I continued along the trail. Here, I might as well
- [The Porch Birth](https://chapter16.org/the-porch-birth/) - Our suburban brick house is similar to the others that line the street, towering a bit over its neighbors but all in all fitting in. That morning, it had been designated a safe house. I didn’t have much confidence in that status, though not all hope was snuffed out as I drove my car into
- [Feeling Welcome and at Home](https://chapter16.org/feeling-welcome-and-at-home/) - In Lessons from the Foothills, Gretchen Dykstra lays out the Berea College dream. The original mission of the school, founded in the Appalachian foothills of Kentucky in the 19th century, was to educate disadvantaged students. This mission was inclusive from the beginning, and Berea was the first integrated, coeducational college in the South — a
- [Healing the Healers](https://chapter16.org/healing-the-healers/) - The COVID-19 pandemic took an undeniable toll on medical professionals’ mental health, but in How Do You Feel? One Doctor’s Search for Humanity in Medicine, Dr. Jessi Gold argues that the culture of the medical field itself greatly exacerbated depression and burnout among healthcare workers. Part memoir, part argument, and part self-help manual, How Do
- [Punching Hitler in the Mouth](https://chapter16.org/punching-hitler-in-the-mouth/) - “You see, I was never the sort who dreamed of running away to join the circus. … But if I’d known there was a place called the Government Code and Cypher School, I’d have begged my mum to send me,” says 19-year-old Jakob Novis. Jakob is half of the talented brother/sister team at the center
- [The Joy of Cookbooks](https://chapter16.org/the-joy-of-cookbooks/) - I'm into porn. Cookbook porn. It's a terrible habit. I have the basics. Betty, Julia, and Fanny. I have the stuff that's a little off. Nigella, Bobby, and an obscure Canadian named Laura. There are the extremes, too. Silver Palate, Babycakes, Death by Chocolate. It's a guilty pleasure. I savor each cookbook as I pull
- [Betrayal and Justice](https://chapter16.org/betrayal-and-justice/) - By the Fire We Carry, a fine book by Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle, tells how the Five Tribes of frontier history (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) were dispossessed first of their Southeastern homelands, then of their reservation lands in Oklahoma — until finally, against the odds, they won back their treaty rights in court.
- [Not Quite a New Day](https://chapter16.org/not-quite-a-new-day/) - Blas Falconer’s Rara Avis In a memorable poem from Blas Falconer’s lean, graceful collection, Rara Avis, the speaker describes a simple action: blowing soap bubbles. But Falconer observes this small moment with such clear, spare attentiveness that we grow spellbound to its quiet space of resonant meaning. This poem, titled “For a Spell,” evokes
- [Do-It-Yourself Spirit](https://chapter16.org/do-it-yourself-spirit/) - Intermedia artist Joe Nolan has covered a wide range of art and film for the Nashville Scene. In his new book Nowville, he tells the story of Nashville’s contemporary art renaissance with a lively oral history featuring numerous artists, gallerists, and curators. Each chapter feels like you’re leaning against a barroom or coffeeshop wall listening
- [Straight on ‘til Morning](https://chapter16.org/straight-on-til-morning/) - On July 3, 1981, a group of young people from the U.S. and Germany launched a homemade raft on the Missouri River near Kansas City, determined to float to St. Louis and from there all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans. They named the raft Eulenspiegel after a character in German folklore. Tom
- [On the Brink](https://chapter16.org/on-the-brink/) - When readers of a certain age see the title of Amina Gautier’s story collection, The Best That You Can Do, they will instinctively recall the theme song from the movie Arthur. Christopher Cross’ catchy chorus, which ponders the dilemma of being “caught between the moon and New York City,” perfectly captures the nostalgic mood of
- [A Singular Life](https://chapter16.org/a-singular-life/) - In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough offer up a memoir filled with details salacious, sorrowful, and deeply sentimental. The story belongs mostly to Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. After dedicating years to recording her recollections on audio tapes, she asked Keough to
- [Inspired by Nature](https://chapter16.org/inspired-by-nature/) - George Masa: A Life Reimagined is an apt title for the new biography by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel. Its subject, a Japanese photographer whose work was vital to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, created a “barrier … between his present and his past” when he arrived in Asheville, North Carolina,
- [Sinister Stories](https://chapter16.org/sinister-stories/) - Smoking Guns, an anthology from the East Tennessee chapter of Sisters in Crime, offers a dozen “original tales of crime and mystery” that take readers into the dark corners of humanity. The writers, with backgrounds ranging from newsrooms to the C.I.A. to underwater naturalist education, share sinister stories of murder, poisoning, theft, stalking, and violent
- [Hunger and Awe](https://chapter16.org/hunger-and-awe/) - Didi Jackson’s luminous new collection, My Infinity, opens with a poem titled “Witness,” signaling the fiercely attentive series of observations to come. In the poem, set on a lush day in Vermont’s Green Mountains, the leaves on the birch trees surrounding the speaker “clap at the sun with their gilded hands … these trees too
- [Writing](https://chapter16.org/writing/) - I am a writer. Okay, that’s not the whole story. If someone asked me “What do you do?” as is customary upon first meeting, I would answer “I’m a geologist.” Which, of course, is also incomplete because no one is only their profession. I could just as easily reply that I am a husband, a
- [Author, Author](https://chapter16.org/author-author/) - A Very Bad Thing, the latest thriller from Nashvillian J. T. Ellison, takes readers on a wild ride of secrets, lies, and hidden connections. Columbia Jones may well be the Taylor Swift of authors. She is hugely popular, filling venues not usually associated with artists of the written word. In Nashville, she appears at the
- [On This Hill](https://chapter16.org/on-this-hill/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on August 8, 2023. *** James McBride begins his latest novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, in 1972 Pottstown, Pennsylvania, with the discovery of a decades-old murder, a mysterious disappearance, and a hurricane that wipes away the multi-ethnic neighborhood of Chicken Hill and, along with
- [Lambs to Slaughter](https://chapter16.org/lambs-to-slaughter/) - In the acknowledgments to his latest novel, Bret Anthony Johnston insists: “We Burn Daylight is not about David Koresh.” But this novel’s unnerving religious leader — a predatory scammer named Perry who insists on being called the Lamb — and the fate of his high-control commune closely resemble Koresh and the 1993 Branch Davidian FBI
- ["Threadbare"](https://chapter16.org/threadbare/) - Threadbare Like milk pouring from a glass bottle, the mourning dove’s velvet coo summons my childhood in a mellow town still tying off its long seam of sleep. Bedroom windows open to the tang of cut grass, tender violets, white- tufted clover. Bumblebees throb, thorns bristle in sidewalk cracks but I don’t heed their stings
- [The Real World](https://chapter16.org/the-real-world/) - “It was real. A TV show that could literally alter the fabric of reality to change one’s life.” This is the premise of Peng Shepherd’s novel All This and More. When the titular game show is first broadcast, the world seems to stop in its tracks and pay attention. “No wonder everyone, everywhere was obsessed
- [The Romance of the Game](https://chapter16.org/the-romance-of-the-game/) - With good books, you recommend titles to your friends; with great ones, you stop friends in hallways to read passages aloud. By that standard, Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is indisputably great. Books like this one perform that rarest of functions, not simply expanding readers’ minds but augmenting their mental
- [A Revolving Door of Death](https://chapter16.org/a-revolving-door-of-death/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on March 11. 2024. The post has been updated with new event information. *** When readers first meet condemned prisoner Stephen West in Death Row Welcomes You, we learn that he spent “the overwhelming majority of his life in the custody of people who wished him
- [People and Place](https://chapter16.org/people-and-place/) - Told in the cadence of a fairytale, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, follows a family of women — the Zooks — who live cloistered on M’sauga Island, a lush enclave suspended in time, named for the poisonous massasauga “muck rattler” snakes that lurk in its grasses. Surrounding the island is a carnivorous marsh
- [Eyes in the Shadows](https://chapter16.org/eyes-in-the-shadows/) - Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s literary debut, Little Ones, is a unique collection of short stories and graphic ephemera. Readers have the pleasure of meeting the title character of “Maria,” a little girl with absent parents who lives in a house alone and watches old boxing matches. The unnamed protagonist of “The Locksmith” has trouble speaking but
- [The Way Back: A Geechee Homecoming](https://chapter16.org/the-way-back-a-geechee-homecoming/) - On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while jogging in the Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood of Satilla Shores. The racially motivated crime made national news just weeks before the murder of George Floyd and the killing of Breonna Taylor galvanized an international movement to shutter white supremacy. It was during this time that journalist, essayist,
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- [Readers Rejoice](https://chapter16.org/readers-rejoice/) - A cemetery caretaker, at home among the dead, drawn into the fraught world of the living. A husband and father who knows well the tragic allure of guns, putting his down. Ghosts in the kitchen, reminding us that food doesn’t just bring us together for meals but connects us across generations. These stories and more
- [Trepidation Is Big Business](https://chapter16.org/trepidation-is-big-business/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on January 22, 2024. The post has been updated with new event information. *** For years Jonathan Metzl and other public health professionals have been on the losing side of America’s gun debate. Despite marshalling mountains of evidence linking permissive gun laws to increased gun-related deaths,
- [Memphis Mourning](https://chapter16.org/memphis-mourning/) - In her website bio, Memphis novelist Sara Koffi describes herself as a writer who seeks to “humanize Black women by giving them space on the page” and “explore the nuances of ‘unlikeable female characters.’” As the Brits might say with a raised forefinger, “tick” and “tick.” Koffi does both in her widely anticipated debut While
- [Taking Up Space on the Page](https://chapter16.org/taking-up-space-on-the-page/) - Renée Watson, who is best known for penning award-winning children’s books that celebrate Black girlhood, stuns with her debut as a novelist. Told through the lens of a 40-year-old protagonist, Lena Baker, skin & bones’ lyrical prose and poetic vignettes examine nuanced dynamics of family and friendship, Portland’s undertold Black history, and American society’s unrelenting
- [Tragicomic Collaboration](https://chapter16.org/tragicomic-collaboration/) - The story Tyler Mahan Coe tells in Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette is about how the two greatest singers in country music history balanced conservatism and innovation in a blatantly commercial genre. George Jones made some of his best music with the record producer Billy Sherrill, an intellectual working
- [Revelation and Revolution](https://chapter16.org/revelation-and-revolution/) - In her first book of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, iconic folk singer and activist Joan Baez mines her life for catharsis. Through writing about her trauma and experiences ranging from familial abuse to sharing the stage with Jimi Hendrix, she seeks to emancipate herself from her pain, celebrate her
- [Forgotten Wars](https://chapter16.org/forgotten-wars/) - For Blackburn Gant, the titular character of Ron Rash’s new novel, The Caretaker, the churchyard cemetery has become a dynamic landscape, one he has learned to read with precision and sensitivity. “As Blackburn stared out the cottage window, ground fog purled around the stones,” Rash writes. “Grave markers appeared unmoored, as if they might drift
- [Coal Catastrophe](https://chapter16.org/coal-catastrophe/) - On December 22, 2008, in the East Tennessee town of Kingston, an earthen dam that held years of coal waste from a TVA power plant collapsed, sending a wave of coal sludge over 300 acres. Making worldwide headlines, the environmental disaster destroyed homes, poisoned a river, and would soon sicken nearly all the workers assigned
- [A Steely Commitment to Change](https://chapter16.org/a-steely-commitment-to-change/) - Among the civil rights era’s holiest shrines is the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where demonstrators famously confronted a hostile all-white police force on March 7, 1965. Images of the officers’ brutal attack against the peaceful protesters on “Bloody Sunday” shocked the country and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act later that year.
- [He Would’ve Said Goodbye](https://chapter16.org/he-wouldve-said-goodbye/) - “It’s kinda hard to hunt for a murderer,” declares young Chloe Alvarez, “when you don’t want to remember that a person is dead.” Chloe is the narrator and main character of Nashville writer Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s latest middle-grade novel, Fowl Play, and she is desperate to know what really happened to her Uncle Will. It’s
- [In Collapse There Is Light](https://chapter16.org/in-collapse-there-is-light/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on December 5, 2023. The post has been updated with new event information. *** Erin Hoover’s No Spare People In “At the child support office,” an early poem in Erin Hoover’s new collection, No Spare People, the speaker must maneuver a bureaucracy that resists recognizing the
- [The Grind City Grip](https://chapter16.org/the-grind-city-grip/) - Back in the early weeks of the 2020 summer, with the pandemic raging and the nation reeling through the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, I hunkered down in my apartment in Memphis and did my best to focus on a book which I had just received a contract to complete. The Realms of Oblivion, as
- [Wine, Dine, and Murder](https://chapter16.org/wine-dine-and-murder/) - Detective Marlitt Kaplan was introduced in Lauren Nossett’s 2022 debut, The Resemblance. Her follow-up, The Professor, takes place shortly after the events of the first novel. Marlitt is trying to lay low and pick up the pieces of her life after fumbling a case that resulted in her being forced to resign from her detective
- [Duality Is Fine](https://chapter16.org/duality-is-fine/) - Devil is Fine is John Vercher’s third novel on biraciality. In this book, he takes us to a coastal town and to grief. Both locales, we discover, are sites of absurdism. A biracial father grieves his deceased son and dying career, realizing that he only understands both through a post-mortem examination. To further complicate matters,
- [The Flood of History](https://chapter16.org/the-flood-of-history/) - Louise Erdrich’s characters learn to make peace with paradox. The people who make you feel safest are the ones most likely to cause you harm — deal with it. The land you love (in this case, the Red River Valley of North Dakota) is filled with the bones of your ancestors who died at the
- [“Haunting My Own Name”](https://chapter16.org/a-haunting-of-my-own-name/) - “Mississippi is all arrivals. Mississippi is all beginnings. But Mississippi is also something we return to, again and again, to find where we started in hopes of catching a glimpse at how we might end,” Julian Randall writes in “Oxford,” the opening essay of his memoir, The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives,
- [Small Victories](https://chapter16.org/small-victories/) - The opening sequence of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch, the 2024 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, raises more questions than it answers. In 1874, a character known only as Papa takes a woman, apparently his wife, to a mental asylum in West Virginia. He tells her that she is now called “Miss Janet”
- [Brave Enough to Try](https://chapter16.org/brave-enough-to-try/) - “You know, anytime I want to wipe out the entire universe,” says 7-year-old Lucy in Somewhere Beyond the Sea, “I remember that humans made music and then I think that maybe, just maybe, you weirdos have something to offer after all.” This funny and thought-provoking sequel to TJ Klune’s bestselling 2020 fantasy novel, The House
- [Loving the World More Fully](https://chapter16.org/loving-the-world-more-fully/) - Perhaps Nashvillian Margaret Renkl needs no introduction, but with the selection of The Comfort of Crows as the 100th title in the wildly popular book club hosted by Reese Witherspoon, the spotlight is once again on Renkl’s unique blend of ferocity and tenderness. Her New York Times essays regularly remind readers of the crossroads encountered
- [Muscadine Vines](https://chapter16.org/muscadine-vines/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on November 14, 2023. The post has been updated with new event information. *** Recurring characters and themes in Monic Ductan’s debut story collection, Daughters of Muscadine, recall the vines of their fictional setting’s namesake. These linked stories reveal the entangled historical and psychological legacies at
- [The Depths](https://chapter16.org/the-depths/) - In his recent novels The Overstory and Bewilderment, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers invites us to set down the blinkered limitations of human perspectives and connect to the natural world in deeper, more urgent ways. Now, with Playground, Powers brings his inimitable storytelling to Earth’s subterranean depths, illuminating the abundant riches of our oceans and
- [Letters to a Younger Sister](https://chapter16.org/letters-to-a-younger-sister/) - When Doan Phuong Nguyen — Vanderbilt alumna and author of middle-grade novel Mèo and Bé — was in elementary school, her family immigrated to Nashville from Vietnam. This complicated transition inspired Nguyen’s new book, A Two-Placed Heart, a lightly embellished autobiographical, epistolary story told in verse. The letter-poems in A Two-Placed Heart are written by
- [Protecting What We Love](https://chapter16.org/protecting-what-we-love/) - Despite its many parks and greenspaces, Nashville is not likely to come to mind when listing places where nature flourishes. More concrete than chrysalis, urban landscapes have much to offer, but attention to the natural world is not the norm. Knowing this, Nashville resident and naturalist Joanna Brichetto defends her urban home, arguing it is
- [A Magical Mountain Fairy Tale](https://chapter16.org/a-magical-mountain-fairy-tale/) - Chattanooga author Natalie Lloyd’s latest tale of heartbreak and hope for middle school readers is The Witching Wind. Roxie Darling and Grayson Patch become friends as incoming sixth graders at Camelot Middle School in fictional Silas County, Tennessee. And, as is always the case in a Natalie Lloyd book, fantastical adventures are soon afoot. The
- [Quietly Determined](https://chapter16.org/quietly-determined/) - Lizzie Craig, the quiet, determined young woman at the heart of Margot Livesey’s The Road to Belhaven, discovers at age 10 that she possesses powers of clairvoyance. When her grandmother Flora, unaware of Lizzie’s gift of second sight, tells her that to attempt to know the future is “the devil tempting us,” Lizzie learns to
- [Liar, Liar](https://chapter16.org/liar-liar/) - In 2016, PolitiFact identified “fake news” as its lie of the year. It was no accident that 2016 was an election year. As Joseph Hayden explains in A History of Disinformation in the U.S., the media has perpetrated periodic lies on issues that shape the evolution of American democracy. Hayden is a professor in the
- [A Runaway’s Story](https://chapter16.org/a-runaways-story/) - There’s a scene in Rachel M. Hanson’s The End of Tennessee: A Memoir where Rachel, aged 15, is standing in the hallway of an East Tennessee theater where she is performing in La Sylphide, a romantic ballet that premiered in Paris in the 19th century. She loves ballet, loves dancing en pointe, loves the way
- [A Country of Purity](https://chapter16.org/a-country-of-purity/) - Over the last two decades, Elizabeth Strout has quietly joined an increasingly exclusive club: literary writers whose work is both critically lauded and enormously popular. Her achievement is all the more remarkable for the fact that her most popular novels and story collections are all set in small, remote New England towns and follow the
- [A Place Called Vulnerable](https://chapter16.org/a-place-called-vulnerable/) - Award-winning writer Karen Salyer McElmurray’s collection of essays, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways, is many things at once: memoir, travelogue, and prayer. Taking inspiration from each of these forms and incorporating them into her singular lyrical prose, McElmurray reflects on her upbringing in rural Kentucky, her adventurous youth traveling the world, and her
- [Variations on the Immigrant Life](https://chapter16.org/variations-on-the-immigrant-life/) - The immigrant’s story is impossible to write. A purely fictional account of dislocation and border crossing misses the surreal quality of identity transformation, whereas poetic figuration obscures the gritty reality and practical complexity of the experience. In his debut story collection, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. has chosen to solve
- [Wedding Blues](https://chapter16.org/wedding-blues/) - It’s impossible for humans to know the end from the beginning, whether writing a poem or attending a solemn ceremony. In search of inspiration on a day in autumn, I was looking through a file of half-written pieces and discovered a poem I was calling “At Janna’s Wedding.” Janna has now been married for seven
- [A Man of the Book](https://chapter16.org/a-man-of-the-book/) - Lookout Mountain dominates the landscape of TAG, the intersection of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, coursing through all three states before tapering to its prominent point, like the bow of an ocean liner, above my hometown of Chattanooga. As a teenager I drove my Mustang up and down Ochs Highway, visiting friends in the affluent neighborhoods
- [The State of the Workers](https://chapter16.org/the-state-of-the-workers/) - Sorry, but there is no way to tell you about Alice Driver’s Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company without disgusting you. Here’s what Victor, a machine operator at Tyson Food’s Chick-N-Quick plant in Rogers, Arkansas, has to say about the ingredients in chicken nuggets, according to
- [Finding the Divine](https://chapter16.org/finding-the-divine/) - Each year, several organizations pull together and host a Homeless Memorial on the riverfront in downtown Nashville. This event, which honors all the folks who’ve died living on the streets in the previous year, is held in the cold of December on a Saturday, and it’s often a morning of somber reflection on all that
- [Unapologetically Unafraid](https://chapter16.org/unapologetically-unafraid/) - Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir, the second book by Knoxville native Darius Stewart, takes readers on a journey of self-discovery as it unearths the complexities of his childhood and investigates life after addiction and an HIV diagnosis. Stewart’s experiences serve as a multigenerational mirror and window for life as a Black
- [Among the Lost](https://chapter16.org/among-the-lost/) - The first words of any book can establish its tone, and in Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, the tone is unmistakable: “The bed is empty.” Before readers know who should be in that bed, before the police investigation, the history, or the sprawling range of characters is introduced, those four words produce a
- [“Bingo Cemetery, Green Mountains, Vermont”](https://chapter16.org/bingo-cemetery-green-mountains-vermont/) - Bingo Cemetery, Green Mountains, Vermont A graveyard marks the trailhead we take almost daily in all weather. More often than not, on one of the graves a bouquet of fresh flowers appears, chrysanthemums I think, a stranger’s morning prayers made manifest. Some of these carved stones, large like granite ships, are over a hundred years
- [How to Start a Civil War](https://chapter16.org/how-to-start-a-civil-war/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on May 6, 2024. *** Most middle-school students are taught that the first shot of the Civil War was fired by Confederate artillery toward Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. The fort’s Union garrison quickly surrendered, and the war was on. But beyond
- [](https://chapter16.org/33982-2/)
- [The World According to Memory](https://chapter16.org/the-world-according-to-memory/) - Minrose Gwin’s bewitching novel, Beautiful Dreamers, covers a lot of ground: lost innocence and found strength, the gifts life takes away and the gifts it gives in return, the lies that hold you back and the lies you run toward. But most of all, it’s about a mother and a daughter and the connection that
- [A Tale of Two Families](https://chapter16.org/a-tale-of-two-families/) - Rachel Khong’s masterful second novel, Real Americans, delves into the lives of two families of vastly different socioeconomic status, taking readers on a poignant and thought-provoking journey through dissimilar, often conflicting, perspectives. Divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, this riveting, multigenerational tale explores the heart of what it means to be
- [So Vulnerably Human](https://chapter16.org/so-vulnerably-human/) - It’s been four years since the unexpected passing of Brad Watson, from cardiac arrest at his home in Wyoming. One of the most gifted and underappreciated American fiction writers of the last half-century, Brad was a master of style and form, but he was also a terrific storyteller and just plain fun to read. Inventive
- [Big Top Labor](https://chapter16.org/big-top-labor/) - The circus performance began when the train rolled into town. A parade of workers emerged, from clowns to sideshow entertainers to roustabouts, with horses pulling wagons stuffed with trapezes and costumes, animal handlers tending to tigers and bears, and elephants powering the erection of the big top tents. In her lively and fascinating history, Circus
- [To Live on This Margin of Earth](https://chapter16.org/to-live-on-this-margin-of-earth/) - Tara M. Stringfellow’s Magic Enuff Tara M. Stringfellow’s Magic Enuff foregrounds the intimate experiences of Black Southern girls and women in nuanced, compassionate poems. As these women confront betrayal, loss, and injustice, they offer their strength hand in hand with their vulnerability, and Stringfellow honors it all — “God can stay asleep / these women
- [Existing Within Each Moment](https://chapter16.org/existing-within-each-moment/) - “I’ve spent my entire life translating myself into a language the outside world speaks,” laments Wei Tchou, familiar to a broader audience for her articles about food and drinks for such publications as The New York Times and The New Yorker. Tchou’s new memoir, Little Seed, is, on the surface, precisely such an attempt at
- [Love and Grief](https://chapter16.org/love-and-grief/) - Kimberly King Parsons’ gritty debut novel, We Were the Universe, immerses readers in the kaleidoscopic psyche of Kit, a woman in her mid-20s, as she navigates parenting her unruly three-year-old daughter while mourning the death of her younger sister, Julie. Kit and Julie were raised by an eccentric single mom who collected armadillo-themed trinkets and
- [The Bewilderment of Memory](https://chapter16.org/the-bewilderment-of-memory/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on January 9, 2024. The post has been updated with new event information. *** Jill McCorkle returns to short fiction with Old Crimes, a collection that explores some of the same themes of memory and loss as her most recent novels, Hieroglyphics (2020) and Life After
- [Hope Is the Thing](https://chapter16.org/hope-is-the-thing/) - Danita Dodson’s most recent collection of poetry, Between Gone and Everlasting, explores the many facets of grief after the loss of a parent. Dodson focuses on the death of her father and discusses grief and its impact across all facets of her life. The voice of the collection is childlike and hopeful, conveying a reverence
- [Good Old-Fashioned Murder](https://chapter16.org/good-old-fashioned-murder/) - FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on November 13, 2023. The post has been updated with new event details. *** The origin of the detective story is, like that of many art forms, a matter of debate. Some historians credit the honor of first whodunit to the Biblical Daniel, others to a
- [What Is Justice?](https://chapter16.org/what-is-justice/) - The most powerful moment in Preston Shipp’s memoir, Confessions of a Former Prosecutor: Abandoning Vengeance and Embracing True Justice, is not flattering. It is not a moment of triumph or a funny anecdote showing the author’s wit and intelligence. It conveys a red hot, burning shame that you feel through the pages. In it, Shipp

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## Authors in History

- [May Justus (1898-1989)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/may-justus-1898-1989/) - May Justus’s stories revolve around her mountain heritage and upbringing. Such stories as “The House in No-End Hollow” and “Dixie Decides” evoke the same rustic childhood that she experienced in rural Tennessee in the early 1900s. Justus was born on May 12, 1898, in Del Rio, Tennessee. Her father was a schoolteacher, and the family
- [Peter Taylor (1917-1994)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/peter-taylor-1917-1994/) - Peter Taylor was born on January 8, 1917, in the small community of Trenton, Tennessee. The Taylor family moved several times during Peter's childhood. While he was still a teenager, his family moved first to Nashville, Tennessee, then to St. Louis, Missouri, finally stopping in Memphis in 1936. Hit hard by the Great Depression, Peter's
- [Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/randall-jarrell-1914-1965/) - Two mysteries surround the life and career of Randall Jarrell: how he was able to accomplish so much in half a century, and whether or not his death at age fifty-one was accident or suicide. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell, the family moved to California when Randall was only a
- [Caroline Gordon (1895-1981)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/caroline-gordon-1895-1981/) - Caroline Gordon was born into the Kentucky line of the extensive Meriwether family in 1895. Exploration of the family's past and its evolution is a major theme of her fiction. She grew up at Merry Mont in Todd County, near Clarksville. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany College in 1916. Gordon taught
- [Jesse Hill Ford (1928- 1996)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/jesse-hill-ford-1928-1996/) - Jesse Hill Ford was born in Troy, Alabama. In 1932, Ford's father took a job with Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company, and the family moved to Nashville. Ford attended Montgomery Bell Academy, where he wrote for the school newspaper and edited the school annual during his senior year. Ford enrolled at Vanderbilt University in 1947, where he
- [John Fergus Ryan (1930-2003)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/john-fergus-ryan-1930-2003/) - Born in Arkansas, John Fergus Ryan called Memphis, Tennessee home for more than 40 years, and graduated from Memphis State University in 1957. He was the author of two plays, The Minor Poet and Doctor Holocaust, and three novels, The Redneck Bride, The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer, and Watching. Some of his work, including
- [James Agee (1909-1955)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/james-agee-1909-1955/) - The morning of Harvard's commencement ceremony in 1932, James Agee rushed over to Sanders Theatre with his convocation ode, which he had been elected to perform in front of his graduating class. He had composed the poem only the night before, finishing it shortly before he was to deliver it. In his rush to arrive
- [Bowen Ingram (1904-1980)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/bowen-ingram-1904-1980/) - Bowen Ingram was the pen name for Mildred Rebecca Prewett Ingram, who was born in Gordonsville, a town named for her ancestor, John Gordon. Always interested in writing, Ingram published her first poem at age 12. She married Daniel Taylor Ingram, Commandant of Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, and began to write for publication
- [Anne Goodwin Winslow (1875-1959)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/anne-goodwin-winslow-1875-1959/) - Anne Goodwin Winslow was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She had little formal schooling, but produced novels, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction.
- [Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/frances-hodgson-burnett-1849-1924/) - Born in Manchester, England on November 24, 1849, Frances Eliza Hodgson was the eldest daughter in a family of two boys and three girls. After her father's death when she was three years old, the Hodgsons experienced severe financial difficulties. As a young girl, she would scrawl little stories on sheets of old notebooks, as
- [James Still (1906-2001)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/james-still-1906-2001/) - James Still was born on July 16, 1906 at Double Branch in Chambers County, Alabama located in the foothills of the Appalachians. Still was the sixth of ten children, but was able to be named after his father because he was the first boy to be born into his family. From 1906 to 1924, he
- [Melissa Duke Mooney (1968-2009)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/melissa-duke-mooney-1968-2009/) - Melissa Duke Mooney lived in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and two children. She worked as a publicist and led many community volunteer projects in her neighborhood of East Nashville. She was the author of one book for children, The ABCs of Rock, an abcdarian with illustrations by Louisville, Kentucky-based Print Mafia. The book features
- [Edd Winfield Parks (1906-1968)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/edd-winfield-parks-1906-1968/) - Edd Winfield Parks was a native Tennessean who spent many years as a literary scholar and a professor at the University of Georgia. He was born in Newbern, Tennessee in February 1906. He earned his Associates degree (1927) from Harvard and received his M.A. (1929) and Ph.D. (1933) at Vanderbilt University. He taught briefly at
- [Ellis K. Meacham (1913-1998)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/ellis-k-meacham-1913-1998/) - A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Meacham was an attorney and judge who also wrote novels set in India. Meacham graduated from the University of Chattanooga, where he received his A.B. in 1935, and later attended Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he earned his law degree in 1937. Meacham practiced law in Chattanooga from 1937-1972,
- [Henry Sydnor Harrison (1880 - 1930)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/henry-sydnor-harrison-1880-1930/) - Henry Sydnor Harrison was born in Tennessee, graduated from Columbia, and served on the staff of the Richmond Times‐Dispatch (1900–1910). His later life was devoted mainly to fiction, the best of his seven novels being Queed (1911) and V.V.'s Eyes (1913). The first, dramatized by Gilbert Emery (1921), is a complacently realistic story of American
- [Mildred Haun (1911 - 1966)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/mildred-haun-1911-1966/) - Author of stories of mountain life, Mildred E. Haun was born in Hamblen County, on January 6, 1911, to James Enzor and Margaret Ellen Haun, but was raised in Haun Hollow in the Hoot Owl District of Cocke County in a large family of strong, independent mountain farmers whose roots could be traced back to
- [Frances Gaither (1918 – 1955)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/frances-gaither-1918-1955/) - When a writer is labeled a "Southerner," he is given an identity; he is linked to his region in a way that the Northerner or Easterner or Westerner is not. Flannery O'Conner once said that Southern writers are "stuck with" being Southern. If so, then the fact of Southern history that they're stuck with is
- [William Clark Falkner (1825-1889)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/william-clark-falkner-1825-1889/) - Born on July 6, 1825 in Knox County, Tennessee, Falkner served in the Mexican War. When the Civil War began, Falkner raised a company of men and was made colonel in the Second Mississippi Infantry. Wounded at First Manassas, he was dropped at the April 1862 reorganization and election of officers. Later in the War,
- [Opie Percival Read (1852-1939)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/opie-percival-read-1852-1939/) - Printer, writer and humorist, Opie Read was a popular novelist and short story writer. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but lived for most of his professional life in Chicago, Illinois. Read attended Neophogen College in Gallatin, Tennessee. Before moving to Illinois, he was the editor of the Statesville Argus (KY), the Bowling Green Pantograph,
- [Harry Norman Dean (1942-2008)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/harry-norman-dean-1942-2008/) - Harry Norman Dean, formerly of Cartersville, was a resident of Cleveland, Tennessee from 1971 until his death in 2008. Mr. Dean received his B.A. from Carson Newman College and M.A. and ED.S. degrees from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He served in the field of education for more than thirty-five years. He was employed
- [Sarah Webster Fabio (1928-1979)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/sarah-webster-fabio-1928-1979/) - Well ahead of the connections that grew between music and poetry during the hip-hop era, several generations of African-American poets drew on musical influences in their works. The writers associated with the politically oriented Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s were especially active in this regard, joining spoken words with blues and jazz
- [Charles Todd Quintard (1824-1898)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/charles-todd-quintard-1824-1898/) - Episcopal Bishop Charles T. Quintard was born in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Isaac Quintard and Clarissa Hoyt. In 1847 he received his medical degree from University Medical College, New York University, and worked for a year at Bellevue Hospital. About a year later, he moved to Athens, Georgia, and practiced medicine there. In 1851
- [Etheridge Knight (1931-1991)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/etheridge-knight-1931-1991/) - Born in Corinth, Mississippi in 1931, and later moving to Paducah, Kentucky, Knight was one of seven children in a low-income family. Dropping out of school after the eighth grade, he soon realized there were few job opportunities for a young, relatively uneducated black man. His despair led him to drug addiction. In an effort
- [John William Corrington (1932-1988)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/john-william-corrington-1932-1988/) - John William Corrington was born in Ohio in 1932; his family moved to Shreveport, Louisiana when he was a young boy. He may have been born in Ohio, and spent some his boyhood years there, but it was Louisiana and, more particularly, Shreveport that Corrington adopted as his spiritual and literary home. It was growing
- [Louise Littleton Davis (1911-1995)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/louise-littleton-davis-1911-1995/) - Louise Littleton Davis, historian and journalist, was born in Paris, Tennessee, one of the five children of Grover C., a career United States army officer, and LaRue Littleton Davis, a musician. Although born in Paris, she left the state at an early age. She was educated in the public schools of St. Louis, at Washington
- [Jim Wayne Miller (1936-1996)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/jim-wayne-miller-1936-1996/) - Not every true Tennessee author has to be born and bred in the state. Some were raised elsewhere, but stumbled into Tennessee at the prospect of a job or scholarship, and discovered much more about themselves. That is how Jim Wayne Miller found himself in Tennessee. Miller was born in Leicester, North Carolina, in 1936.
- [Robert Young Drake (1930-2001)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/robert-young-drake-1930-2001/) - Robert Young Drake, Jr. was born in Ripley, Tennessee on October 20, 1930. He attended Vanderbilt University, receiving his B.A. in 1952 and M.A. in 1953, and Yale, receiving another M.A. in 1954 and his Ph.D. in 1955. Drake taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1955-58), at Northwestern University (1958-61), at the
- [Clara Cox Epperson (1869-1937)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/clara-cox-epperson-1869-1937/) - Clara Cox Epperson was born in 1869 in Gainesboro, Tennessee. She was the daughter of Robert Alexander Cox and Nancy Joseph Draper. Clara Cox received a B.A. degree from Nashville College for Young Ladies in 1887, and an M.A. in 1891. Prior to her marriage to Mr. John Ananius Epperson, she taught school at Dixon
- [Wilma Dykeman (1920-2006)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/wilma-dykeman-1920-2006/) - In 1955, seven years before the publication of Rachel Carson’s famed Silent Spring, another woman fought to issue her own groundbreaking analysis of environmental concerns. Wilma Dykeman spent years studying the rivers of western North Carolina, but after she wrote her book The French Broad, her publishers tried to remove the chapters on pollution. However,
- [Elizabeth Avery Meriwether (1824-1916)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/elizabeth-avery-meriwether-1824-1916/) - Elizabeth Avery Meriwether (1824-1916), Tennessee suffragist, temperance activist, publisher and author, was born in Bolivar on January 19, 1824. Her father, Nathan Avery was a physician and farmer, while her mother Rebecca Rivers Avery was the daughter of a Virginia planter. Financial problems led the family to move to Memphis around 1835. Nathan’s death in
- [Arna Bontemps (1902-1973)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/arna-bontemps-1902-1973/) - Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902, Arna W. Bontemps began life with roots in the Southern United States. But at age 3, Bontemps moved with his family to California, escaping the racism of the South. When Bontemps’s mother died, he was sent to live with his uncle who introduced him to Southern black
- [Merrill Moore (1903 - 1957)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/merrill-moore-1903-1957/) - Austin Merrill Moore was born on September 11, 1903, in Columbia, Tennessee, to parents John and Mary. Moore credited his father, who was also a Tennessee poet, as his earliest literary influence. He had strong Southern values and ties. His grandfather was a captain in the Confederate army and his father was the Tennessee director
- [Roark Bradford (1896-1948)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/roark-bradford-1896-1948/) - Roark Bradford, novelist, short story writer, and journalist, was born in Lauderdale County, where he was raised on a cotton plantation in the Nankipoo-Knob Creek area. The African Americans who worked the farm and with whom he attended church strongly influenced him. He closely observed their lives and drew on his early experiences to create
- [Richard Marius (1933-1999)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/richard-marius-1933-1999/) - Richard Marius, historian and novelist, was born in Martel, the son of a Greek father and a Methodist mother from Bradley County. Looking back on his childhood, Marius later identified three elements that contributed to his writing career: a love of the English language, the experiences of a vividly remembered childhood, and his profession as
- [Richard M. Gunn (1904-1995)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/richard-m-gunn-1904-1995/) - Tennessee folklorist and humorist Richard M. Gunn, more commonly known as “Pek” Gunn, born in Pinewood in Hickman County, was appointed Poet Laureate of Tennessee in 1971, and held the position until 1994. Married early to Frances Thompson, he furthered his patronage as a Tennessean. He became a member of ASCAP (American Society Composers, Authors,
- [James Dickey (1923-1997)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/james-dickey-1923-1997/) - A brilliant, eccentric, and complex man, James Dickey was not afraid to express his opinion and step outside the traditional creative boundaries of writing to explore new and unique forms. His fascination with nature and exploring the beast within man became an essential part of his legacy. Dickey was born in Buckhead, a suburb of
- [Will Allen Dromgoole (1860-1934)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/will-allen-dromgoole-1860-1934/) - Will Allen Dromgoole was born in Murfreesboro, the last child of John Easter and Rebecca Blanche Dromgoole. When she was six, Dromgoole changed her middle name to Allen, and throughout her life was known as Will Allen or "Miss Will." In 1876 Dromgoole graduated from the Clarksville Female Academy and studied at the New England
- [T.S. Stribling (1881-1965)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/t-s-stribling-1881-1965/) - The Tennessee riverside town of Clifton is home of author Thomas Sigismund Stribling, described accurately by reviewer Richard Moore as an “odd duck.” Stribling was the author of sixteen books, a multitude of articles, and is best known for his novel trilogy that explored political and social injustices, and included The Store, winner of the
- [Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/mary-noailles-murfree-1850-1922/) - Though many do not know much about Mary Noailles Murfree, several scholars find it hard to discuss Southern literature without her; she is in fact labeled “Tennessee’s foremost woman writer of fiction” on a historical landmark in Murfreesboro. She is one of the top local color fiction writers of the Smokey Mountain region, and though
- [George Scarbrough (1915-2008)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/george-scarbrough-1915-2008/) - By the time George Addison Scarbrough received his high school diploma in 1935, near age twenty, his family had moved more than a dozen times. His father, William Oscar Scarbrough, was an itinerant sharecropper forced on a regular basis to load his large clan in a wagon and find farm work on land always owned
- [Wilmer Mills (1969-2011)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/wilmer-mills-1969-2011/) - Steady rhythm and rules were driving forces not only behind Wilmer Mills’ daily life, but also his poetry, as he thought of “narrative, metrical, old-fashioned poetry as a kind of non-mechanized farming, using outmoded metrical devices to create an organic gardening on the page.” Mills’ affection for manual labor began in his youth, when his
- [Walter Sullivan (1924-2007)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/walter-sullivan-1924-2007/) - Death was very much a part of life for Sullivan during his childhood years. His father, Walter, died when he was only three months old, leaving Sullivan to spend his infancy in a grieving family with his mother and her parents. Every Sunday afternoon his paternal grandparents visited, and they all went to the cemetery
- [Beth Slater Whitson (1879-1930)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/beth-slater-whitson-1879-1930/) - Songwriter Beth Slater Whitson was born in Goodrich, Hickman County, Tennessee, on December 1, 1879. Her parents were John H. Whitson and Anna Slater Whitson; her father was coeditor of the Hickman Pioneer newspaper. Beth Whitson began her extensive songwriting career in Hickman County. With the assistance of her younger sister Alice Whitson Norton, she
- [Joan Williams (1928-2004)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/joan-williams-1928-2004/) - Williams’ writing career began in 1948, when she won the Mademoiselle college fiction contest her junior year at Bard College. The story she submitted, “Rain Later,” also garnered an honorable mention in the 1949 edition of Best American Short Stories. Following that triumph, Williams decided to intensify her energies on writing. Shortly after reading The
- [Alex Haley (1921-1992)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/alex-haley-1921-1992/) - On January 30, 1979, 130 million people tuned in to watch the conclusion of the ABC miniseries Roots. For eight consecutive nights, viewers had been enthralled by the story of a slave, Kunte Kinte, from his abduction in West Africa, up through his death on an American plantation. The real-life story of Roots eventually led
- [Evelyn Scott (1893-1963)](https://chapter16.org/author-in-history/evelyn-scott-1893-1963/) - Evelyn Scott, who came of age in New Orleans, began her literary career as a poet but expanded into other literary genres, including short stories, essays, novels, memoir, and drama. She was an important figure in modernism, an artistic movement that flourished in the United States and Europe during the first three decades of the

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## Editor’s Notes

- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35689/) - Today at Chapter 16, Lauren Nossett answers a few questions about her latest thriller, Indie Darling, which sends a Dolly Parton-loving private detective searching for a missing singer-songwriter. Nossett tells Sarah Norris that the novel, despite its dark and unsettling side, is "a love letter to Nashville." David Wesley Williams reviews Stranded in the Future, the second memoir from "pop surrealist" Robyn Hitchcock. "Hitchcock
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35660/) - The initial author list for this year's Southern Festival of Books has been released, and it's a varied, stellar lineup that includes Margaret Renkl, Claudia Rankine, Ayad Akhtar, Ann Patchett, Ben Fountain, and many more. See the announcement here and the full list at the festival website. For Chapter 16's ongoing coverage of festival books, go here to find it
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35644/) - This Thursday, June 18, is the final day of Humanities Tennessee's spring fund drive. There's still time to donate and support HT's programs, including Chapter 16 and the Southern Festival of Books. And speaking of the festival, the Author Reveal Party on June 18 is full, but folks who'd like to attend can go to the Eventbrite page and join the waitlist. We're
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35630/) - This week, Chapter 16 looks at three very different books that explore big questions. In her review of Susannah Felts' new novel, The Come Apart, Bianca Sass writes that the protagonist, an aspiring musician, struggles with an "age-old and universal" dilemma: "Is it enough to make art for the sake of self-expression, or is external recognition what endows art (and life)
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35612/) - Alex Haley's Pultizer Prize-winning Roots was published 50 years ago, and the book, along with its widely viewed miniseries adaptation, had a lasting effect on American culture and our shared understanding of the country's history. This week at Chapter 16, Lucas L. Johnson II discusses his new book, Remembering Roots, which surveys Haley's multi-faceted impact. "Roots," he notes, "inspired people –
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35596/) - Okay, we know we're getting a little ahead of the solstice, but June is almost upon us, and it's been feeling a lot like summer here in Middle Tennessee. The hot months aren't traditionally a big season for book releases, but there are some exciting titles from Tennessee authors on the horizon, including fiction by Susannah
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35576/) - If you're in the Nashville area, now's the time to RSVP for the Southern Festival of Books reveal party on June 18. Be the first to hear about this year's stellar lineup of authors. And just a reminder: The Humanities Tennessee spring fundraising campaign is underway through June 18. Please give to support the festival and other HT programs, including Chapter 16. Today
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35562/) - Humanities Tennessee has launched its spring fundraising campaign "to build a more curious, connected, and civil Tennessee for ourselves and future generations." The goal is to raise $25,000 by June 18 to support the Southern Festival of Books, the Shared Futures Lab, and other vital programs, including Chapter 16. To donate and find out more about the campaign, see the donation page at
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35549/) - It's May already. How did that happen? Hard to believe that we're not even six full months away from the 2026 Southern Festival of Books, but it'll be here before we know it, and planning is already well underway. If you subscribe to the newsletters for Humanities Tennessee and the festival, you already know that the reveal party will be
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35531/) - Writers looking for a spell of literary community in a revered locale should note that registration is currently open for The Yok Shop conference in Oxford, Mississippi, which will take place June 5-7. Faculty for this year's conference will include Michael Knight, M.O. Walsh, and Olivia Clare Friedman. For established and aspiring playwrights, the STAAR Theatre in Pulaski is seeking submissions for
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35512/) - This Saturday, April 25th, will be the 13th Annual Independent Bookstore Day. Stores around the U.S. are planning special events for the occasion, so check the national map for a participating store near you — or see our list of Tennessee bookstores for destinations here in the 16th state. Today at the site, Sean Kinch reviews the latest story collection by Irish
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35496/) - Submissions for the 2026 Porchlight Prize in Poetry are now open. The winner will receive a minimum $300 award, as well as publication in Porchlight and a planned anthology. The deadline for submissions is May 31. And speaking of deadlines, it's not too late to apply for this year's Young Writers' Workshop, held at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville and open to students age
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35486/) - 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
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35469/) - Sheri Lea Sellmeyer's Nashville's New Americans takes an up close and personal look at the issue of immigration via profiles of individuals from around the world who have made Nashville home. Reviewer Caroline Siegrist writes that the book "serves as a powerful reminder of the immense diversity the city contains," and she notes Sellmeyer's observation that immigrants have been
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35459/) - Spring is here and it's bringing more literary gatherings along with the flowers and sunshine. The second annual Zone 3 Writers' Festival and Book Fair will take place at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville on April 16-18. In Nashville, the MNPS Book Fest will be held at James Lawson High School on March 28, with authors including Sharon Cameron, Jeff Zentner, Tyler Merritt, and many
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35437/) - Humanities Tennessee welcomes a new staff member this month. René Dillard, a former public schoolteacher with degrees from Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago, is HT's director of development. You can find out a bit more about her here. (She's a fan of reading, dogs, and fireflies — a stellar trio of interests, in our humble opinion.) Today at
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35421/) - 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
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35402/) - Novelist, short story writer, and poet Ron Rash is well known to Chapter 16 readers, and there are two upcoming opportunities for aspiring writers to benefit from his wisdom. He'll be the keynote speaker at this year's Spring Literary Festival at ETSU, where he'll appear along with Nickole Brown, Rose McLarney, and Juan Martinez. This fall, Rash will serve as one of the faculty members for the 2026 Tremont
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35379/) - The 2026 season of the TN Writers | TN Stories series will kick off at the Tennessee State Museum on March 7 with Mary Ellen Pethel and Don Cusic discussing their book Howdy! The Minnie Pearl Story, winner of the 2025 Tennessee History Book Award. (Look for a review of the book at Chapter 16 next week.) The series will run through the fall, with scheduled authors to
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35368/) - Chapter 16's founding editor, Margaret Renkl, is well known for her essays and New York Times columns about the natural world, with a particular focus on the under-appreciated wonders to be found in her own back yard. She has collaborated with her brother, artist Billy Renkl, on several books, and they've teamed up again to create their first book for children.
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35351/) - Reverend James Lawson Jr. was not the most visible figure in the Civil Rights Movement, but he was a major influence on its commitment to nonviolence and played a critical role in many key events, including the Nashville sit-ins and the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. Before he died in 2024, Lawson collaborated with writer Emily Yellin on his
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35323/) - The 2026 Tremont Writers Conference in Townsend, Tennessee, is scheduled for October 21-25, and the faculty lineup this year includes Ron Rash, Kelli Jo Ford, Crystal Wilkinson, and Linda Parsons. Applications are open through May 15. Blair, a nonprofit press based in North Carolina, recently announced that it would be reviving the New Stories from the South series, formerly published by Algonquin. They're accepting short story nominations from
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35340/) - Black History Month began in February 1926 when historian Carter G. Woodson launched a movement to promote knowledge of Black history and achievement. What started as a one-week observance has become a month each year devoted to exploring and raising awareness of Black history. As the tradition reaches its 100th anniversary, Jarvis R. Givens surveys its origins and meaning in I'll Make
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35302/) - The dates for the 2026 Southern Festival of Books have been announced. Make plans to be at the Bicentennial Mall, Tennessee State Museum, and Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville on October 17 & 18 for this beloved literary gathering. Author submissions are open through May 31. The initial lineup will be announced this summer, and you can be sure to hear
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35284/) - Two regional literary journals are open for special submissions in the weeks ahead, including The Pinch, which is accepting entries for The Page Prize in Nonfiction through January 31. Submissions for The Pinch's fiction and poetry prizes will open on February and March, respectively. Callaloo seeks submissions for its 50th anniversary "Southern Voices" edition through February 14. And poets with a full-length unpublished
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35269/) - Welcome to our first newsletter of 2026. Poet W.S. Merwin wrote about bringing to a new year "our knowledge such as it is / and our hopes such as they are / invisible before us / untouched and still possible." His words are a reminder that knowledge and hope are essential, and here at Chapter 16, we think the highest
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35246/) - This is our last newsletter of 2025, but we're wrapping things up with an eye toward the future. We're delighted to announce that submissions for the 2026 Tennessee Book Awards are open today and will run through February 17. Eligible books must have a 2025 copyright date and be traditionally published, and the author must be a current
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35237/) - 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
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35218/) - December is here, and with it comes the tidal wave of year's best lists. We think readers are perfectly capable of making their own lists of books they loved in 2025, but it's still nice to see so many fine books with a Tennessee connection get a shout out. For instance, Tiana Clark's Scorched Earth and Maria Zoccola's Helen of Troy, 1993 were
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35202/) - 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
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35182/) - 2026 will be here before you know it, and things are looking pretty promising on the book front. Last week, we mentioned Ann Patchett's Whistler, due in June. Novels by Ruta Sepetys and Susannah Felts will also be released that month (see the News Roundup below for links). You won't have to wait quite that long for Tayari Jones' Kin, which will arrive
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35168/) - The bad news is that daylight saving time has ended and the sun now sets before many of us can get home from work. The good news is that chilly weather and long evenings create excellent conditions for reading. Now's the time to start tackling that TBR pile — before holiday shopping finds you adding
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35154/) - There are still tickets available for the October 29 evening at Nashville's Schermerhorn Symphony Center with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben. Ann Patchett will moderate the conversation about Witherspoon and Coben's co-authored thriller, Gone Before Goodbye — and no doubt a few other subjects, as well. Proceeds from the event benefit Humanities Tennessee. Don't miss it! Today at Chapter 16, Zane McNeill discusses Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35141/) - Another festival is in the books, and we hope everyone who attended came away with good memories and a taller TBR pile. Many thanks to all the individuals and organizations who helped make it happen. (And remember, it's never too early to start planning for next year. Just ask Roy Burkhead, who has made it to 28
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35124/) - The 2025 Southern Festival of Books is just a few days away, and we trust that everyone planning to attend has taken a minute to look over the schedule and the terrific author roster. While you're perusing the schedule, be sure the click on the menu for the performance stage, which lists the good things on offer there, including a performance
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35113/) - Tickets are going fast for the October 29 appearance of Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville. Ann Patchett will serve as moderator for this stellar literary evening, and all proceeds for the event will benefit Humanities Tennessee. Tickets are available here, and we'll be sharing a review of Witherspoon and Coben's novel, Gone Before Goodbye, next week at Chapter 16. This
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35092/) - The 2025 Southern Festival of Books is just 3 weeks away, so if you're planning to attend, be sure to keep up with the latest announcements via the newsletter and social media. In case you missed it, the schedule of sessions has been announced, and the full list of authors is here. The Authors in the Round dinner is now sold out, but see the event page if you'd
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35073/) - One of the mixed blessings of this digital age is that there are wonderful stories posted online every day, and only a tiny fraction of them ever reach a large audience. We rarely share such stories from Tennessee writers in the Chapter 16 newsletter, but two caught our eye this past week that deserve a mention. One
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35058/) - Michael Zibart, founder of Nashville-based BookPage, passed away on September 5. In an Instagram post, Zibart was remembered as "a visionary and kind leader whose storied career in the book business led to the creation of BookPage in 1988. He was a mentor and friend to many, and will be deeply missed." The Zibart family has a long history
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35041/) - The recipients of this year's Tennessee Book Awards have been announced, and we're delighted to celebrate three outstanding authors whose work was chosen by a stellar panel of judges. The award for fiction goes to Vic Sizemore of Maryville for his novel God of River Mud, which judge Rebecca Makkai describes as "a layered, nuanced and often harrowing story of people ill-used
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/35028/) - Memphis native Alan Lightman has been guiding his readers through the realm of science for four decades, exploring ideas about the universe through essays, inventive fiction, and even children's books. In The Shape of Wonder, Lightman and fellow scientist Martin Rees team up to counter popular skepticism about science by explaining what scientists actually do, what drives them, and how they see the goals of
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34978/) - We're excited to feature some of this year's Southern Festival of Books authors in our upcoming schedule, including an interview with John T. Edge about his memoir House of Smoke; a review of Blood Harmony, Barry Mazor's biography of the Everly Brothers; and an excerpt from Feller, the new poetry collection from Tennessee Book Award winner Denton Loving. Of course, there's considerable festival coverage already on the site. In June,
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34967/) - It's an all-festival lineup at Chapter 16 this week, with reviews of three very different books by authors who'll be joining us in Nashville on October 18-19. Cheryl McKissack Daniel, a Nashville native, will discuss The Black Family Who Built America, her account of her remarkable Tennessee family and their architectural and entrepreneurial legacy. Reviewer Peggy Burch describes the book as "disarmingly
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34948/) - The July heat was pretty relentless this year, and no doubt there are a few sweltering days still to come, but here at Chapter 16 we're already looking forward to fall and the return of our beloved Southern Festival of Books. The 2025 author lineup includes, among many others, Jason Reynolds, Hannah Pittard, and David Levithan. You can see a list of all Chapter
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34919/) - This is our last newsletter before Chapter 16 takes its usual July hiatus, but never fear: We'll be back on August 4 with new book coverage and literary news. In the meantime, make sure you're subscribed to the newsletters for Humanities Tennessee and/or the Southern Festival of Books. An exciting announcement about the festival is coming soon! Speaking of exciting
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34903/) - Summer has arrived, bringing hot weather and, at least for some of us, a little down time and more opportunities to relax with a book. If you happen to be in the mood for poetry, don't miss Emily Choate's roundup of recent collections, with books by Richard Tillinghast, Stephanie Niu, and Abby N. Lewis. Aram Goudsouzian interviews fellow historian Brian Kwoba about his book Hubert
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34889/) - In recognition of the upcoming Juneteenth holiday, Chapter 16 is featuring an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Serina K. Gilbert and Learotha Williams Jr., From the Fiery Furnace to the Promise Land, which tells the story of a remarkable Dickson County community founded by formerly enslaved men and women after the Civil War. We also have Bradley Sides' essay "Volcanic, Universal Inspiration," a story about
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34878/) - Father's Day is coming up, and we're marking the occasion with a trio of pieces that feature stories of fathers and their children. "July 16, 1944," an essay by longtime contributor Chris Scott, is the story of "a curious man," as Chris puts it, who saved himself and his yet-to-be-conceived offspring when a moment of caution overcame his natural inquisitiveness. Faye
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34865/) - Memphis Magazine published a column by Alex Greene last week on the broad impact of the NEH funding cuts in the city. Chapter 16, especially through its media partnership with the Commercial Appeal, is part of that picture. University of Memphis historian Aram Goudsouzian, a regular Chapter 16 contributor, was also personally affected, losing a grant that would have supported completion of his new book, The Sports Page. As
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34849/) - The funding crisis had us so preoccupied back in April that we failed to nod to National Poetry Month. But there's always plenty of poetry news here in Tennessee. Some recent items of note: Marcus Wicker announced a new poetry collection, Dear Mothership, due in 2026. Major Jackson shared some thoughts with Vanderbilt Magazine on how to read a poem. Caki Wilkinson received the Clarence
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34834/) - The cover for Gone Before Goodbye, Reese Witherspoon's collaboration with award-winning mystery author Harlan Coben, was revealed last week, and that got us thinking about some of the other intriguing books due for release this fall. Silas House, writing as S.D. House, has penned his own mystery novel with Dead Man Blues, which, like Gone Before Goodbye, is due in October. September will bring Nashville
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34816/) - The Mountain Heritage Literary Festival is coming up May 30-31, with featured authors including Frank X Walker and Denton Loving. The Clarksville Writers Conference will take place June 4-6. Margaret Renkl and Billy Renkl will be the keynote speakers for the conference, and featured authors include Amy Wright, Joy Jordan-Lake, and Meredith Lyons. If you've dreamed of a Smoky Mountain writing retreat, take note that the Tremont Writers Conference is still
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34800/) - There's abundant good news this week about Humanities Tennessee's fundraising efforts in response to the DOGE cancellation of NEH grants. The outpouring of support from Ann Patchett's $20 challenge has been extraordinary, with more than 1,000 contributors so far. The campaign continues through May 9. Meanwhile, other donors have made generous gifts, and the Mellon Foundation has stepped up to offer a
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34788/) - If you follow Parnassus Books on social media (and who doesn't?), you've probably seen Ann Patchett's video announcing her matching campaign in support of Humanities Tennessee. She's urging her followers to donate $20 — the price of a paperback book — to save HT's many programs, including Chapter 16 and the Southern Festival of Books. She'll be personally matching those gifts up to $10,000. The link
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34746/) - The funding crisis continues for state humanities councils, including Humanities Tennessee. Serenity Gerbman, HT's director of literature and language programs, shared a letter last week explaining the gravity of the situation and what's at stake. She writes, "What I can tell you is that, if this period of federal funding uncertainty persists, Humanities Tennessee will cease to exist within a
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34771/) - Our friends at The Porch, Nashville's nonprofit writing center, are having a fundraiser on May 9 to benefit Humanities Tennessee during the current funding crisis. Yurina Yoshikawa will lead a generative writing workshop followed by an open mic reading with the theme "Tennessee, in Your Own Words." See all the details here. (And don't forget The Porch's own annual fundraiser on May 2, which will
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34731/) - As many of you know, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) recently targeted the National Endowment for the Humanities, and their drastic cuts to the agency include rescinding existing grants to all the state humanities councils, including Humanities Tennessee. This funding is essential to Humanities Tennessee's many programs, including the Southern Festival of Books, the Young Writers' Workshops, and Chapter 16. We're asking
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34716/) - Today at Chapter 16, Sara Beth West reviews Happy Land, the latest novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, inspired by the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a real 19th-century community founded by formerly enslaved people on the border of North and South Carolina. Perkins-Valdez describes her vision of Happy Land as “both a literal and metaphorical manifestation of a people’s desire to rise into
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34693/) - We teased spring in the newsletter a few weeks ago, but it's officially arrived now — so here are a few more spring-into-summer happenings to keep in mind: Independent Bookstore Day happens on April 26, and indie stores across Tennessee have special plans to welcome customers that day. Check out your favorite local shop and make plans to
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34672/) - The authors for the 2024 TN Writers | TN Stories event series have been announced, and it's another stellar lineup this year. The series will kick off on April 12 with Keith B. Wood discussing his book The Memphis Red Sox and it will wrap up in October with Kevin Wilson and his forthcoming novel, Run for the Hills. The roster also includes John P.
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34625/) - The Porch, Nashville's nonprofit literary center, will be holding its annual fundraiser on May 2, and this year's featured authors are Tennessee's own Mary Laura Philpott and Margaret Renkl. On May 3, Memphis will welcome Roxane Gay as one of the keynote speakers for this year's Bookstock author festival. (Check out the news roundup below for a conversation between Gay and poet Saeed Jones.) Today
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34602/) - Celebrated poet, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic Ishmael Reed will visit Chattanooga on March 15 as a featured speaker for the Chattanooga Public Library's Culture on 4 series. Reed, who was born in Chattanooga, first gained a reputation as an original, uncompromising literary voice with his early novels Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34579/) - We're coming out of last week's bitterly cold weather, and of course the rising warmth isn't really spring arriving, but it feels a bit that way. Spring will get here eventually, though, and some fine literary gatherings will come with it. In April, Lorrie Moore will be the featured author for Chattanooga's annual Writers@Work event, and Janisse Ray and Charles Dodd White are among the faculty for the Appalachian
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34558/) - This year's TN Writers | TN Stories author talk series at the Tennessee State Museum is taking shape, and an exciting list of authors will be announced soon. In the meantime, explore the videos of past events — a great way to get your book chat fix without leaving home on these cold, gray late-winter days. And speaking of book events,
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34525/) - When you visit Chapter 16 today, you'll find that we've had a bit of a glow up. Here are a few words from Serenity Gerbman, director of literature and language programs at Humanities Tennessee, about our new site design: We launched Chapter 16 way back in 2009 on a shoestring budget, and we are forever indebted to artist Billy Renkl for creating
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34495/) - Last week we mentioned forthcoming spring books, and this week it's bookish spring gatherings. Appalachian WordFest (formerly the Rose Glen Literary Festival) will take place at the Sevierville Convention Center on March 1. Presenters will include Mike Maden, Robert Beatty, and The Smoking Guns (Sisters in Crime). Plenty Book Shop in Cookeville is hosting Wine and Words Book
- [](https://chapter16.org/editor-note/34491/) - As this newsletter is being composed, Middle Tennessee is experiencing its first real snow of the winter, and your Chapter 16 editor can hear children outside making the most of this rare sledding opportunity. In times of joy as well as times of trouble and loss, there's something about gently falling snow that brings a sense of

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