Chapter 16 - Part 8

Cool with the Lines

Eighties pop phenomenon Rick Springfield is back in the headlines with a tell-all memoir

By Fernanda Moore | October 21, 2010

October 21, 2010 Late, Late at Night, Rick Springfield’s tell-all memoir, opens with a seventeen-year-old Rick swinging from a noose, convinced his life is not worth living. Happily for Rick, as well as for the zillions of fans who would, in the 1980s, fall in love not only with his endlessly catchy parade of hit singles like “Jessie’s Girl,” but also with Dr. Noah Drake, the sexy character he played to perfection on the venerable soap opera General Hospital, the noose gave way just in time. Springfield talked with Chapter 16 prior to his Nashville and Murfreesboro appearances on October 22 and 23.

River Magic

River Jordan talks with Chapter 16 about her multifaceted literary career

By Fernanda Moore | September 2, 2010

September 2, 2010 Nashville writer River Jordan is a literary polymath—she’s a playwright, an essayist, and a novelist with four books under her belt—and her range and ambition are remarkable. While her novels all have a kind of dreamy Southern mysticism, her book of “recollections,” called The Deep Down Dirty South, features stories about people who are “tough as nails, terrible in their mightiness—downright frightful survivors of a hard life.” Her newest novel, The Miracle of Mercy Land, tells the story of a young editorial assistant at a Depression-era newspaper in South Alabama who’s privy to the discovery of a magical book. Jordan will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 7 at 7 p.m.

Loving Norman, and Having the Final Word

With her new memoir, Norris Church Mailer emerges from her husband’s long literary shadow

By Fernanda Moore | April 5, 2010

The plot could have come straight from a bodice-ripper: she was a stunning young art teacher from Arkansas; he was a notoriously macho New York author twice her age. Hoping for an autograph, she cadged an introduction, and sparks flew. In A Ticket to the Circus, Norris Church Mailer tells the story of her thirty-two-year love affair with and marriage to Norman Mailer, the American writer as famous for his peccadilloes (six wives, eight children, and dozens of mistresses) as for his Pulitzers (two). Norris Mailer spoke with Chapter 16 in advance of her appearance at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on April 6 at 6 p.m.

Inundated

Rhodes professor Jeffrey H. Jackson considers the Paris flood of 1910—and its eerie similarity to New Orleans after Katrina

By Fernanda Moore | January 13, 2010

A century ago, the City of Light went dark as the river Seine overflowed its banks. Memphis professor Jeffrey H. Jackson describes the forgotten Parisian flood of 1910 and the massive human effort required to save the city. Jackson will read at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on January 19 at 6 p.m.; at Vanderbilt University on January 21 at 4 p.m.; and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on January 21 at 7 p.m.

Reasons for and Advantages of Fiction

Former Bredesen speechwriter Lydia Peelle discusses her debut story collection—and the pleasure, and usefulness, of writing what you don’t know

By Fernanda Moore | October 7, 2009

It’s impossible to tell from reading her debut story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, that Lydia Peelle isn’t a native Tennessean. Chapter 16 investigates how a born-and-bred New Englander—a woman who grew up in Massachusetts, went to boarding school in New Hampshire and to college at Amherst—could write a collection of stories that places her firmly among this generation’s finest Southern writers.