FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Every year, when the stresses of the holiday season begin whipping up into frenzy, I weather them by imagining that I’m roaming around the world described in the Dylan Thomas story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”: the magic of winter, the mysteries surrounding older family members, and the odd flexes of time when normal schedules are suspended.
Twenty years after her mother’s death, Nashville poet Lisa Dordal unexpectedly found a trove of letters from her. This discovery set Dordal reeling, eventually resulting in Next Time You Come Home, a fascinating experiment in how to honor a loved one’s legacy. Lisa Dordal will discuss Next Time You Come Home at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 21-22.
At the center of Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker, is Blackburn Gant, who does his best to look after both the dead and the living. Ron Rash will appear via Zoom with George Singleton at The Emporium in Knoxville on October 5.
In books like Wild Spectacle and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Georgia author, naturalist, author, and farmer Janisse Ray communicates profound reverence for the profuse complexity within our world’s ecosystems. Ray will be the keynote speaker at the MTSU Write Conference in Murfreesboro on October 7.
“The Overstory,” writes Emily Choate, “is like the Smokies — a lush host to manifold inhabitants, some knowable to the casual visitor and others elusive, inscrutable.” Choate will lead a virtual discussion of Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on July 18.
Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two unnamed women, working in different centuries, who both find themselves apprenticed to male botanists cataloguing every species of plant growing among the stones of the Roman Colosseum.
