Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

The Worthless Servant

Novelist Ann Patchett takes a ride with Charlie Strobel, Nashville advocate for the homeless

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.

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The Crafts of Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Mountaintop speech was more than brilliant rhetorical art; it was also the culmination of a lifetime spent in intense and extensive reading

April 2, 2015 We rightly associate Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratorical eloquence with his vocation as a Baptist minister, following his father and grandfather before him. But King also emerged from the rhetorical tradition of the liberal arts, transforming the sources with which he engaged throughout his too-brief life.

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Happiness Is a Sad Song

Dr. Ralph Stanley discusses his 63 years in music

From the Chapter 16 archive: When he was a child, he was often called “the boy with the hundred year old voice.” In his book Man of Constant Sorrow, Stanley recounts a career spanning six decades and millions of miles.

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Engaging Ontogeny—and Animal Sex

Michael Sims discusses biological and literary creativity

From the Chapter 16 archive: Where do babies come from? It may be a child’s question, but the answer is far from simple, especially if we consider the baby-making processes of the whole animal kingdom, as Michael Sims does in his companion to the National Geographic Channel’s television special of the same name, In the Womb: Animals. It features ultrasound images of fetal animals that are so detailed and vivid it’s almost hard to believe they aren’t simulations.

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Multiple Souths

Anjali Enjeti considers her identity in an evolving region in Southbound

In the final pages of Southbound, Anjali Enjeti’s collection of essays on identity, race, and Southern politics, the author poses one simple but thorny question that looms like a ghost over much of the work: “Who am I?”

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In Between One Thing and Another

Alexander Chee illuminates the writing life in How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

In his powerful essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee charts his own history as a writer and invites readers into a close engagement with the process of writing a novel from personal materials. Chee will appear at a virtual event hosted by Vanderbilt University on November 12.

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