In the aftermath of tragedy, what can a friend really say?
June 27, 2012 Two years ago, at 9:30 on Thanksgiving morning, my best friend’s husband was shot to death in his home. My friend had spent the previous evening watching classic movies late into the night and was still sleeping when she heard two shots. She remembers praying, as she wrapped a robe around her, slid into her slippers, and ran down the hallway, that she had heard only the sound of slamming doors.
Read more
Poet, translator, and editor Don Share talks with Chapter 16 about his new book, the centennial year of Poetry magazine, and his Memphis roots
June 26, 2012 Memphis native Don Share, poet and senior editor of Poetry magazine, has recently released his third poetry collection. In Wishbone, Share energizes his well-crafted lines with wit and hard-wrestled emotional truths. Many of the poems in Wishbone reflect on the transient nature of life and our attempts to muddle our way through loss. As Share explains in an interview with Chapter 16, “We’re always using whatever strength we have to grasp things, to hold on, and sometimes to wave goodbye.”
Read more
In her new memoir, Full Body Burden, Memphis writer Kristen Iversen recounts a childhood haunted by secrets
June 25, 2012 “My childhood has been shadowed by two enormous fears: my father’s alcoholism and Rocky Flats,” writes Kristen Iversen, director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Memphis. With honesty and dignity, Iversen explains how her increasingly troubled father and ineffectual mother created a fragile home life that depended on silence and secrets—an atmosphere not unlike that of the mismanaged and deadly dangerous nuclear-weapons facility at Rocky Flats, located near their suburban Colorado home. In Full Body Burden, Iversen illuminates the beauty of her childhood memories, but she does not flinch from uncovering the damage simultaneously inflicted upon her and her family, upon the land, and ultimately upon us all.
Read more
Benjamin Busch’s memoir, Dust to Dust, examines life through an elemental lens
June 22, 2012 In Dust to Dust, Benjamin Busch recounts his life through a series of meditations on the physical world. This unorthodox memoir, which concerns itself quite literally with the stuff of a life, puts the reader in touch with the elemental struggle we all share. Busch will discuss and sign Dust to Dust at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on June 24 at 3 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 11 at 6:30 p.m.
Read moreVanderbilt University’s digitized database of Robert Penn Warren’s conversations with civil-rights activists provides students and scholars with a chance to “listen in” on the movement
May 23, 2012 In 2008, the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt University held a civil-rights symposium for scholars and for those who participated in the movement. The event commemorated both the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the unveiling of a new, digitized collection of interviews with civil-rights leaders conducted by Warren during the 1960s. The Warren Center has now launched an updated version of the site, and Chapter 16 recently spoke with Mona Frederick, executive director of the center, about the collection and the opportunities for research it provides.
Read moreIn The Juice novelist Jay McInerney collects the best of his essays about wine
June 20, 2012 Former Nashvillian Jay McInerney is enjoying a fruitful summer thanks to his love of grapes and their derivative beverages. A novelist who also works as an enthusiastic wine critic for The Washington Post, McInerney has published The Juice: Vinous Veritas, a collection of essays on his favorite subject.
Read more
