Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Nice Work

Sonny Brewer assembles an astonishing pool of Southern writers to reflect on their day jobs

October 20, 2010 Novelist and anthologist Sonny Brewer may have hit upon the best-ever idea for an essay collection. Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit contains accounts by Pat Conroy, John Grisham, Winston Groom, and a score of other Southern writers on the sorts of work they did on their way to becoming professional writers.

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Quite a Few Words

Adam Ross snags a rare two-week appearance on NPT’s A Word on Words

October 19, 2010 It’s an authorial feather many writers never get to add to their caps at all: an invitation to appear on legendary journalist John Seigenthaler’s NPT program, A Word on Words. But Nashville novelist Adam Ross recently appeared in two different episodes of the program. Listen to the podcasts here.

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Rebel, Rebel

Poet Reid Ward contemplates life, love, and responsibility from the confines of his “cage”

October 19, 2010 Reid Ward is a preacher’s kid, and like of lot of “PK”s, he’s a natural-born insurgent. During high school, Ward was bright and likeable but not exactly focused on academics. More than anything, he hated his English classes—“I don’t remember ever reading a book all the way through until after high school,” he says. When he was eighteen, Ward fell from the roof of his family home and broke his neck. Paralyzed from the chest down, he ultimately discovered a lifeline in literature. Reid Ward reads from his new poetry collection, The Atrophy of the Sun, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on October 19 at 7 p.m.

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Fantine's Folly

The protagonist of Susan Straight’s new novel can’t escape the past until she understands it

October 18, 2010 Traversing both the gentrified pockets and gangstaland of Los Angeles, as well as the sugar-cane fields and sweltering swampland of Louisiana, Susan Straight’s new novel is a complex work of art. Take One Candle Light a Room offers exquisitely rendered settings, lyrical prose, and a formidably large cast of characters. Its narrator, Fantine Antoine, an African American of Louisiana Creole descent and California birth, is an accomplished travel writer, but in this book she undertakes a journey unlike any she has experienced before—one that stands to alter her path permanently. Straight will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 18 at 6 p.m.

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Still in Mourning

For ten years, Ann Patchett had a sweet gig with the now-defunct Gourmet magazine

October 18, 2010 In an essay for The Wall Street Journal, Ann Patchett remembers the decade she spent freelancing for Gourmet magazine, when “Magazine work was a beautiful party and we all just figured it would go on forever.” For Patchett, the party featured assignments to exotic destinations, a generous expense account (which once reimbursed her for a soup turtle she had set free), and– perhaps most luxurious of all– an editor who valued her work: “For 10 golden years they picked up the tab while I ate at the best restaurants and laid down my head

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