Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Maria Browning

Poet as Alchemist

Chapter 16 talks to Blas Falconer about his new guide for aspiring poets

September 15, 2010 Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets brings together a group of accomplished writers to discuss the mysterious craft of writing poetry. Poet and Austin Peay professor Blas Falconer, one of the book’s editors, speaks to Chapter 16 about the collection, and about his own creative process.

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Seeing Evil Where There is None

Lynn Powell tells a riveting tale of an innocent mother’s fight against a child-pornography charge

September 1, 2010 In 1999, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother named Cynthia Stewart took a few pictures of her eight-year-old daughter playing in the bathtub, little knowing that they would lead to her indictment on child-pornography charges. In Framing Innocence, author Lynn Powell tells the story of Cynthia Stewart’s ordeal—and of the community that came to her defense.

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The Bard of Hume-Fogg

Poet and educator Bill Brown talks about his writing and his approach to teaching

August 26, 2010 Bill Brown has combined a lifelong vocation as a poet with a distinguished teaching career, including twenty years at Nashville’s Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet high school. He recently published his fourth collection of poems, The News Inside. He answered questions about his earliest efforts as a poet, his philosophy of teaching, and the future of poetry in the Internet age.

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Toothache

Why do the crybabies get all the ice cream?

August 20, 2010 I’ve never had a baby, or a kidney stone, or even a broken leg; the brain-spearing throb of a bad tooth is about the closest thing to agony I’ve ever known. I’m not especially fond of agony, so all my adult life I’ve trotted off to the dentist every six months, in the naïve belief that check-ups would save me from ever again experiencing the dental nightmares I endured as a kid. But no. The tooth demon paid a call over the last long holiday weekend, which I spent gobbling Advil and watching with horror as the right side of my face puffed up like a bullfrog’s throat. Bright and early on the first day office hours resumed, I was reclining in the dental chair, contemplating my complicated relationship with authority and pain.

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Beneath All the Sex and Violence

Eric Jerome Dickey talks with Chapter 16 about the hard work that goes into his stylish thrillers

August 17, 2010 Memphis native Eric Jerome Dickey has been turning out fast-paced, sexy, wildly popular novels since 1996. His latest, Tempted by Trouble, puts a timely twist on the thriller genre with a protagonist driven to crime by the economic downturn. Prior to his book signings this month in Memphis and Nashville, Dickey answered questions from Chapter 16 about the work that goes into his remarkably successful books, and about the mysterious appeal of his violent, morally compromised characters.

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The Neglected Survivors

Kathleen Koch writes a hopeful account of Hurricane Katrina’s impact on the Mississippi coast

August 12, 2010The relentless news coverage of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina obscured the fact that the Mississippi Gulf coast was just as devastated by the storm. In Rising from Katrina, former CNN reporter Kathleen Koch, a one-time resident of the Mississippi coastal town of Bay St. Louis, writes about the destruction there and the residents’ heroic struggle to rebuild. Koch will discuss her book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on August 12 at 6 p.m.

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