Margaret Renkl

April 2, 2010 John Seigenthaler will interview Barry Mazor, author of Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, on the April 4 edition of A Word on Words. The program airs on Nashville Public Television at 10:30 on Sunday morning. Learn more about A Word on Words here, and read Paul McCoy’s interview with Mazor for Chapter 16 here.

April 1, 2010 When Humanities Tennessee launched Chapter 16 last October, we held our collective breath a bit, wondering whether there were enough book lovers to sustain a literary website even as newspapers around the state were cutting their books coverage or shuttering their book sections altogether.

March 31, 2010 Today, on one day’s notice, mommy-blogger and Memphis native Heather Armstrong, author of It Sucked and Then I Cried, dropped everything and flew to D.C. at the invitation of the White House. Her role: to explain to the president of the United States how hard it is to be a working parent.

March 30, 2010 When Madison Smartt Bell was researching his trilogy of novels about the struggle for Haitian independence, it took him ten years to find the materials he needed—and not because Google didn’t yet exist. “At the time that I got my first glimpse of it, the Haitian Library of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit had recently been unearthed from the hiding place it had occupied during the Duvalier regime,” he writes in an article in The Huffington Post. “The Spiritain fathers were prominent in the liberation theology movement, whose democratic activism made them enemies of the dictatorial state. Duvalier expelled them from Haiti in the sixties; the library was boxed, and effectively buried.”

March 27, 2010 Nashville novelist Ann Patchett has written probably a million words in her own career, but brevity is the soul of her new endeavor: Patchett will judge the fourth round of National Public Radio’s “Three Minute Fiction” contest. As in the past, contestants must write a story that can be read aloud in less than three minutes without forcing Guy Raz to transform himself into an auctioneer. (That’s about 600 words, tops.) But this year Patchett has introduced a new wrinkle: all stories must contain the words, “plant,” “button,” “trick,” and “fly.”