Forgotten Wars
At the center of Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker, is Blackburn Gant, who does his best to look after both the dead and the living. Ron Rash will appear via Zoom with George Singleton at The Emporium in Knoxville on October 5.
Fiction
Finding Her Literary Voice in the South
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Cathie Pelletier, a native of Maine, fell in love with Tennessee when she and a friend hitch-hiked down South over thirty years ago. After moving to Nashville in 1976, Pelletier found inspiration in almost everything, from the bars frequented by songwriters to the smell of springtime wisteria. Today, she talks about her time in Tennessee and the way it has shaped her writing.
Building Momentum
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: A former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly discusses with Chapter 16 the slow death of local newspapers; his latest Harry Bosch installment, Nine Dragons; electronic books; and his popular legal-series protagonist, Mickey Haller.
The Worthless Servant
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Nashville’s Room in the Inn serves individuals experiencing homelessness by providing a winter shelter program, recuperative care, education and workforce development, and solutions for permanent housing. In the summer of 2012, novelist Ann Patchett made the rounds with Room in the Inn’s founder, Father Charles Strobel, and wrote an essay about the experience, which appears in Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience, From Joan of Arc to Oscar Romero, edited by Catherine Wolff.
The Comedy of Empathy
From the Chapter 16 archive: “Doubt is essential to the writing life,” Andrew Sean Greer says. “If you only had arrogance, you’d write a book that’s all ego.”
One Cure to Heal Them All
From the Chapter 16 archive: In Balm, Dolen Perkins-Valdez investigates the possibilities of healing the personal and national trauma caused by the Civil War.
