Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

A Recipe for Disaster

Michael Lee West whips up a suspenseful soufflé of subterfuge and skullduggery

April 27, 2012 Teeny Templeton is back in the soup, and it’s not one of her own quirky recipes, like I’m-Scared-to-Try-New-Things Tilapia with Orange-You-Glad-You-Took-a-Risk Marinade. Teeny has witnessed a murder—or at least thinks she has—and now must solve the crime before the police pin it on her, again. A Teeny Bit of Trouble follows Michael Lee West’s hapless heroine from Charleston, South Carolina, to Bonaventure, Georgia, in search of the truth—and the perfect peach pie (recipe included). West will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 5 at 6 p.m.

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The Hunger in Our Souls

Award-winning children’s author Bill Myers talks with Chapter 16 about what’s popular with YA readers today and laments the darkness he finds there

April 26, 2012 Speculative fiction is an umbrella term that includes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and other highly imaginative genres, often incorporating a supernatural bent. Christian writer Bill Myers is a bestselling, award-winning, and highly prolific author of such stories for young adults. Along with Heather Burch, author of Halflings, and Jill Williamson, author of Replication: The Jason Experiment, Myers will make three stops in Middle Tennessee next week: on April 27, he will appear at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood at 6 p.m.; on April 28, they will be at Lifeway Christian Store in Murfreesboro at noon, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 4 p.m. These events, designed especially for teen readers, will include interaction with the authors, scavenger hunts, and the chance to win a Nook or Kindle e-reader.

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“Binary Things”

April 25, 2012 Rachael Lyon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of The Normal Heart and How It Works (2011), winner of the 2010 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award and finalist for the 2010 Black River Chapbook Competition. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from George Mason University and recently completed a Fulbright grant in Vienna, Austria, where she translated poetry from German. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review’s Old & New: Re-Visions of the American South, Southern Humanities Review, and The Nashville Review, among others. At work on her first collection of poems, she is an academic adviser and creative-writing instructor at Penn State.

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A Writer’s Influence

As Richard Bausch prepares to leave Memphis, Chapter 16 pays tribute to the generosity of a beloved author and teacher

April 24, 2012 Acclaimed writer Richard Bausch has taught at the University of Memphis since 2005. Over the years, he’s also given great time and energy to mentoring writers in the wider community. As he prepares to leave for a new job in California, Chapter 16 considers his legacy of inspiration and support. Richard Bausch will give his farewell reading at the University of Memphis on April 25 at 8 p.m. in the University Center Theater, Room 145.

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Gone but Not Forgotten

Rheta Grimsley Johnson looks back on a life entwined with the music of Hank Williams

April 23, 2012 If any singer/songwriter nailed the deep pain and loneliness in the American heart, it’s Hank Williams. He also personified another American artistic tradition: live hard and die young. In Hank Hung the Moon … and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts, former Memphis writer Rheta Grimsley Johnson pays tribute to the artist who wrote the soundtrack of her life.

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Charlotte, Sixty Years Later

In an essay for The New York Times Book Review, Michael Sims describes the barn where Charlotte hung her web

April 23, 2012 Michael Sims is a curious—but not a nosy—biographer, as Chapter 16‘s Serenity Gerbman pointed out in her review of Sims’s bestselling 2011 book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: “White was famously reclusive and—strange as it may seem for a biographer—Sims understands and respects that need for privacy. Allowing White’s words and experiences to speak for themselves, he offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the life and mind that created Charlotte’s Web, but of the creative process that led to the book and of the sheer work it entailed. The Story of Charlotte’s Web is quite literally that: a biography of the book itself. How did it come to be? What forces and experiences throughout White’s life shaped him and converged to bring his timeless classic into being?”

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