Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Storytellers with Loud Guitars

Capturing the Drive-By Truckers on the page

miracle, really — they didn’t just do what the world was telling them to do and bag it. How many other bands would have? How many other potentially great bands…

Slow Violence, Then and Now

Rob Nixon discusses writers, activists, and the challenges of the Global South

…Agent Orange. Slow violence is pertinent to environmental justice because the incremental unfolding of threats to human and environmental health is experienced unequally by wealthy and impoverished communities. Time can…

As Real as They Are Magical

Bradley Sides’ debut collection delivers sincerely strange stories

…mythical creatures abound, as human characters struggle to understand the unknown and, often, each other. In multiple stories, young believers try to convince fearful authority figures to embrace the supernatural.

The Collateral Consequences of Hubris

Ed Tarkington talks about the class conflicts at the heart of his second novel, The Fortunate Ones

…functioning according to two fundamentally different perceptions of reality. Early on, I realized that my story was really about two distinct worlds — alternate realities, if you will. My narrator,…

Radical Joy

In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the “Black Camelot” of mid-20th-century Detroit 

…an initially confusing device that unfolds slowly to reveal a deeper layer of story.  Of course, the real-life Randall gave herself this assignment. She spent years poring through Ziggy’s columns…

The Whole of a Life

Bobbie Ann Mason gives her heroine a second life in Dear Ann

Alto, debating Dickinson and Romantic poets Keats and Shelley (whom Jimmy calls “Sheets and Kelly”). Like her peers Denis Johnson and Tim O’Brien, Mason was shaped by the Vietnam War…

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