Alan M. Clark digs into history and horror in The Door That Faced West
March 11, 2014 In his new novel, The Door That Faced West, author and illustrator Alan M. Clark digs into the history and horror of the early Tennessee wilderness. It’s a dark story that unearths an even darker landscape in the minds of his characters.
People think they’re buying Girl Scouts cookies; what they’re really buying is a ticket back to childhood
March 7, 2014 I am a little embarrassed now that I hesitated to let my daughter sign up to be a Daisy. I was never a Girl Scout myself; all I knew about the organization was that they sold cookies and that some of those cookies were called Thin Mints. I assumed that “Girl Scouts selling cookies” really meant “parents selling cookies,” and I would frankly prefer to clean shower drains for two months.
A liberal-arts graduate endures the indignities of a job search
March 6, 2014 It’s important to clarify one thing: there’s a big difference between a job search and a Google search. I’ve done a fair amount of Googling, and I can report that if you’re typing things like “jobs Nashville” into Google, you are on the road to nowhere. Either that or you’re making great progress toward becoming a foot-fetish model for single men in Antioch. You’d be amazed at the need for foot-fetish models in Antioch, Tennessee.
Remembering a childhood friend, lost and found and lost again
March 5, 2014 Over the years, I had turned to almighty Google to find my childhood friend, but there were too many Peter Watsons out there, perhaps, or perhaps I didn’t try hard enough. One way or another, I never found any footprints pointing toward Nashville, where long ago we were running buddies—not fellow joggers, as that term has come to mean, but boys who ran around together, made mischief, and learned a little something about how the world works.
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At the Rattlesnake Festival in Claxton, Georgia, a writer confronts her lifelong fear
March 4, 2014 When my family first moved into our home in Wartrace, Tennessee, snakes were a problem. Our land was infested with a wide variety of slitherers, many of which my father and uncles killed, sometimes with guns and hoes, sometimes with tractors, but snakes still found us. They sunned themselves in our driveway, hid in the hedges, and once climbed up our fireplace mantel. I developed a fear of being taken by surprise. But at the Rattlesnake Festival, watching a kingsnake glint in the afternoon light, my only sensation was wonder.
What if, instead of cyclists, drivers saw people on bikes?
March 3, 2014 Faced with fleshing out the facts, I didn’t immediately think of the guy who tried to run me off the road. I thought of the baby who got me over the ridge. As I wrote, what I remembered of that day was not the fear that was still gripping me. I remembered the innocence that inspired me.
