March 8, 2013 Nashville author Ruta Sepetys talks with Chapter 16’s Stephen Usery about her latest novel, Out of the Easy. Sepetys is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novel Between Shades of Gray, which won the 2012 Golden Kite Award and was a finalist for both the 2012 William C. Morris and Amelia Elizabeth Walden Awards. Out of the Easy follows seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine, the daughter of a prostitute. Josie longs to escape the underworld of New Orleans brothels in the 1950s.
Read more
Essential Toils
For Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest, age-old remedies hold the secret of healing broken lives
March 7, 2013 Becca Stevens, chaplain at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville, has spent the better part of her adult life trying to help women broken by rape, forced prostitution, homelessness, addiction, and other physical and emotional trauma. In her new memoir—equal parts journal, spiritual guide, and history lesson—Stevens details her own sexual abuse and healing and how her ministry has led to the founding of Thistle Farms, a cottage enterprise run by women in the process of healing themselves. As part of the Salon@615 series, Becca Stevens will discuss and sign Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling on March 12 at 6:15 p.m. Doors open at 5:45, and the event is free.
Read more
The Box of Hope
Memphis native Anna Olswanger has written a tiny but powerful book of Holocaust literature for middle-grade readers
March 6, 2013 Anna Olswanger’s new children’s book, Greenhorn, tells the story of Daniel, a young Polish Holocaust survivor who arrives at a Brooklyn yeshiva in 1946. He’s carrying nothing but a mysterious small tin box, the contents of which he refuses to reveal. For his silence, Daniel is the object of both cruelty and compassion from his American peers. A tiny book with an enormous heart, as heartbreaking as it is brief, Greenhorn is a poignant, powerful addition to the canon of Holocaust literature for young people.
Read more
Before FEMA
Memphis librarian Patrick O’Daniel considers the great Mississippi Valley Flood of 1927
March 5, 2013 Drawing on an impressive collection of sources, Memphis librarian Patrick O’Daniel has documented every aspect of the disastrous Mississippi Valley flood of 1927. His new book, When the Levee Breaks, is a condensed encyclopedia covering where the water came from, where the levees broke, who died, who was rescued, and who responded. Memphis, which mostly escaped the devastation, became the main response center for recovery, and O’Daniel uses the flood as a vehicle for examining the Mississippi Valley’s agricultural and economic condition in 1927, the pervasive racism of the time, and the politics involved in rebuilding. Patrick O’Daniel will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on March 9 at 2 p.m.
Read moreThe Meaning of Meme
Nashville novelist Ann Patchett reflects on what it’s like to be in “the cultural loop”
March 4, 2013 Perhaps most celebrated for her novels, including the bestselling Bel Canto and State of Wonder, and for her independent book store, Parnassus Books in Nashville, Ann Patchett has recently enjoyed a morsel of fame on the HBO sitcom Girls. The show, well into its second season, makes a habit of aggressive name-dropping and has decided to bring Patchett into the spotlight.
Read more
Responding to the Beauty of a Broken World
Terry Tempest Williams talks with Chapter 16 about her newest memoir
February 28, 2013 Terry Tempest Williams was fifty-four years old when she began writing her newest memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, a book she began in response to her own mother’s death at age fifty-four. In it she tells the story of finding her mother’s journals—all blank—and contemplates the place of silence in a writer’s life. Williams will discuss When Women Were Birds at Parnassus Booksellers in Nashville on March 6 at 6:30 p.m.
Read more