Essays

Moping around the house, I acted as if I was the first parent to be cut off from reading with their kid. But parenthood delivers sudden reversals to all who dare to raise a child, particularly those who become overly attached to routines, traditions, or phases. You never know when they will end, sending you swerving in a new direction.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Divorce is an ugly business — at least it was for me. I felt as though everything in my life was broken: my home, my family, even my sanity. I didn’t know it then, but far from being over, my life was about to get interesting.

Author Vince Vawter draws on decades of hard-earned writing wisdom to craft some inspirational quotes of his own. Vawter will appear at Neighborly Books in Maryville on January 25 and Novel in Memphis on February 10.

My freshman English teacher was a shaggy-haired hobbit-poet in horn-rimmed glasses. Most of Bill Brown’s students towered over him, but his sheer exuberance left us gazing up at him in wonder.

I thought, how ironic, these gashes in my lower cheek and chin, hot and throbbing, my face a surprised welt I knew would scar, the left no longer my good side, a fitting present as I enter my “invisible” elder years more fully.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Every year, when the stresses of the holiday season begin whipping up into frenzy, I weather them by imagining that I’m roaming around the world described in the Dylan Thomas story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”: the magic of winter, the mysteries surrounding older family members, and the odd flexes of time when normal schedules are suspended.