Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Charting a Course

A childhood friendship filled with possibility

In our play, Jim and I coexist in a landscape of our own discovery with an atmosphere of richer oxygen. The world opens up in a new way, more becomes possible, there is a new kind of magic and an altered reality.

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Quintessential Observer

Brandon Taylor on his Southern roots and the joys of analog

Brandon Taylor’s prizewinning story collection, Filthy Animals, has just been released in paperback. He spoke with Chapter 16 about his Southern roots, his Baptist upbringing, how his brief career as a scientist has influenced his writing, and why he has been increasingly drawn to analog technologies in our digitally obsessed world.

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When the Looking Changes

Critic and author Teju Cole thinks about photography and politics

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing. 

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Making Believe

God’s Rascal examines the life of fundamentalist J. Frank Norris

“If fundamentalism had not existed,” Barry Hankins tells us, J. Frank Norris “would have invented it.” In God’s Rascal, Hankins offers a portrait of a talented, abusive man whose fiery rhetoric shaped a major U.S. religious movement.

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Big Man on Campus

James Dickey in the classroom

In those days I wanted to become a novelist, but Mr. Dickey, author of a bestselling novel and wildly successful screenplay, taught only poetry, which he called in one of his book titles “the central motion.” So poetry it was.

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