Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Book Excerpt: Ann Patchett's State of Wonder

For Marina Singh, the protagonist of Ann Patchett’s riveting new novel, meeting Annick Swenson means confronting the most haunting episode of her own haunted past

April 25, 2011 In her forthcoming novel, State of Wonder, which hits shelves June 7, Nashville author Ann Patchett tells the story of Marina Singh, a researcher for a pharmaceutical company, who had trained to be an obstetrician, until a tragic mistake in the delivery room drove her from medicine. For more than a decade, she has tried to forget the botched C-section and the supervisor, Annick Swenson, who failed to come to her aid when the patient developed complications. But when the pharmaceutical company she works for sends Marina deep into the Amazon to find the elusive Dr. Swenson, who has spent the intervening years working in the jungle to develop a miracle fertility drug, Marina must confront both her long-feared professor and her understanding of her own past. In the following excerpt, Marina is on board a boat piloted by Easter, a deaf native child whom Annick Swenson has raised as a son. They are approaching the riverside village of the Lakashi, where the women of the tribe continue to bear children into old age.

Read more

Franklin's Charge

Novelist Robert Hicks appears on CBS Sunday Morning

April 25, 2011 In its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, CBS Sunday Morning toured the battlefield at Franklin, where 10,000 soldiers lost their lives in one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict. Their tour guide? Bestselling novelist Robert Hicks, whose debut novel, The Widow of the South, turned Carnton Mansion into a tourist destination. “Something important happened here, this place, and in all the battlefields,” Hicks told CBS.

Read more

Author in the Prime of His Life

Brad Watson, who just won a Guggenheim, has come a long way from driving a garbage truck

April 22, 2011 To be a fiction writer from Mississippi is to inherit a literary legacy as heavy as Gulf Coast air in August, one rippling with stories of lives both remarkable and remarkably debauched. Enter the novelist and short-story writer Brad Watson, whose fiction does not traffic in what his friend Barry Hannah dismissed as “a canned dream of the South.” Still, it is laced with just enough distinctly Southern settings and characters for a reader to feel she’s getting the real deal—a Mississippi writer who is carrying on the literary legacy of his home state. Watson will be the visiting writer at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy April 25-26. On April 25, he will give a public reading in the Pfeffer Lecture Hall at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Read more

"I Dream it Every Night"

In her charming memoir, Every Day by the Sun, Dean Faulkner Wells gives flesh and blood to the memory of William Faulkner—and of the Oxford of old

April 20, 2011 When Dean Faulkner Wells was thirteen, she attended the premier of Intruder in the Dust at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family. With the spotlight shining on William Faulkner, Wells came to a dawning understanding of her uncle’s role in literature—and in the world. Now the author of a new memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi, she talks with Chapter 16 about William Faulkner’s literary legacy, how her extended family wrestled with the Civil Rights movement, and why Cormac McCarthy should win the Nobel Prize. Wells will present a slide show and discuss Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 21 at 5 p.m.

Read more

The Freedom They Fight For

The female artists in Jewly Hight’s new study of Americana music are making music their way—even if their record labels aren’t always thrilled

April 20, 2011 Part revivalist genre, part American-music-melting-pot, Americana music is “born of considerable artistic freedom—though, when a major record label is involved,” writes Nashville music journalist Jewly Hight, “the freedom may have to be fought for.” In Right By Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs, Hight considers eight remarkable female singer-songwriters: Lucinda Williams, Julie Miller, Victoria Williams, Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, Ruthie Foster, Elizabeth Cook, and Abigail Washburn. These women have all fought that good fight, but what they share most is their unconventionality and a gutsy dedication to their own evolving visions, often at the expense of broader fame or commercial success. Hight will discuss and sign Right By Her Roots on April 23, 11 a.m., at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. During the event, she will also interview Americana musician Sarah Siskind, prior to Siskind’s own performance. The cost of this event is included with museum admission and is free to museum members.

Read more

Report from Chattanooga, Day Three

Sadness and laughter punctuated the final day of the Conference on Southern Literature

April 19, 2011 After a few closing words from Allen Wier, the conference was over, though a few folks lingered to get a last book signed or picture taken. It will be two years before this wonderful group of writers and readers gathers again. That seems like a long wait.

Read more
TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING