May 25, 2010 The waters finally receded, but as the news reports got grimmer and grimmer and the photographs got more and more heartbreaking, three Nashville novelists decided to do something about the flood. As thousands of citizens fanned out across the region to help their neighbors drag saturated carpet and drywall to the street, Myra McEntire, Amanda Morgan, and Victoria Schwab tried to think of a way to use their connections as writers to help.
May 24, 2010 The numbers are astonishing: ten times in the past two years, Hohenwald novelist Sherrilyn Kenyon has landed in the number-one slot of The New York Times bestseller list. Kenyon already has twenty-two million copies in print of her paranormal books for adults, and those titles have been printed in more than thirty different countries. Tonight she launches a new series of books, this time for teen readers, called The Chronicles of Nick.
May 21, 2010 From a field of more than 4,000 entrants, Ann Patchett has awarded the first-place prize in National Public Radio’s Three-Minute Fiction contest to Yoav Ben Yosef’s “Not Calling Attention to Ourselves.” Listen to Patchett read the story—and offer some priceless advice about what makes a short-story work—here.
May 12, 2010 Oprah Winfrey’s Harper Studios will join forces with Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series True Blood, to make a film version of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Memphis author Rebecca Skloot, according to an AP report today. The film will air on HBO, but no production schedule or air date has been announced.
May 5, 2010 A need to hurry up and finish seems to be encoded in the writerly DNA, particularly for novelists. Poets and short-story writers can have something finished to show after a few weeks’—or even a few days’—work, but novelists slog along in pained isolation for months and months and months and months. And all the while they suspect their friends of secretly thinking, “Yeah, sure, you’re writing a book.” To be taken seriously, to be recognized as a real writer, you have to finish the book, sell it, and get it out there.
April 28, 2010 In 1985 at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, professors David Till and Malcolm Glass founded a literary magazine which they called Zone 3, in honor of the temperate growing zone of middle Tennessee. This was a staggeringly hopeful endeavor. Even twenty-five years ago, it was not clear that poetry itself—let alone literary magazines devoted to it—would survive the twentieth century. If cable television hadn’t swamped the little boat of lyric poetry, the coming tsunami not yet known as the Internet surely would.
