Essays

Beautiful and brutal. Brash and fruitful. Memphis means something. I love it as a place, I love it as a people, and I love it as a promise.

I’m a believer in synchronicity: one sighting begets another — the more you see, the more you get — like these spiraled pearls outside my door just as summer ends, on the cusp of bittersweetness when losses cut deeper in autumn, bleed into the brilliant dying back.

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.

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.

I used to think about the longevity of gifts. What could be given that would be cherished for more than a handful of days or a couple of weeks? Finally, after I had a few years of teaching behind me, I figured it out: stories. Stories do not fade.

It’s been more than 10 years since I took those tentative and unwitting steps toward a part-time career as a “professional writer,” a label I never would have dared apply to myself until Margaret Renkl gave me permission.