Last week I sat in the Memphis airport and waited to board a United Airlines flight. My dog was on my lap. My dog is a 10-pound, 10-year-old, double dapple miniature dachshund named Maui. Most people love Maui. She is small and cute and charming. When Maui travels with me she spends the plane ride in …
Like so many people across the country and around the world, I marched this weekend. My husband and I joined the crowd of about 200,000 men, women, and children in Denver. We walked and chanted and laughed and waved as we ran into people we knew from various places. We failed to meet up with …
As I mentioned in this space last week, I’m currently reading The Storied South, a book that compiles interviews from southern writers, photographers, musicians, painters, and scholars. In the sections featuring Margaret Walker and Alice Walker, both women talk about the influence of Zora Neale Hurston. It’s been many years since I read Their Eyes Were Watching God. I …
For Christmas, my mother gave me a book called The Storied South. It’s a collection of interviews, conversations, and excerpts from lectures compiled by southern folklorist William Ferris. I’ve been reading bits and pieces each day. It’s the sort of book that’s good to read in bits and pieces. Today, I was particularly struck by this observation from Margaret …
On the day after Christmas, my husband, my mother, and I went to a nearby theater for a matinee of La La Land. On Christmas Eve we’d attended a live performance of the musical Finding Neverland, the story behind the story of Peter Pan. So a movie musical homage to Hollywood seemed like the perfect capper to our holiday entertainment. Plus, …
Each year, Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver enlists a series of guest bloggers for its Lit Counts series. It’s a lead-up to Colorado Gives Day and it offers writers the opportunity to blog about why literature matters. Head over to the Lighthouse Blog to read my entry this year. If you are a Denver-area writer, reader, lover …
In Ron Rash’s 2008 novel Serena, he creates a female character who is so ambitious and ruthless that she seems devoid of moral considerations. It is a stunning accomplishment in an era when readers clamor for likability. Frankly, I think likability is overrated in fiction. I believe the likability complaint is mostly used as a way to dismiss …
At this time next week, the election will be over. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly remember what it feels like to live in a world without political advertisements and October surprises that are really just the same old news reported in a different way. I’m so glad I live in a …
In Dispatches from Pluto Richard Grant tells the story of moving from New York City to live in an old farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta. For some reason, the book was shelved in the travel section at my local bookstore, but it’s not a travel guide. Instead it’s part humorous memoir and part cultural anthropology. Grant, who is …
In 1991 I spent a long week covering the capital murder trial of Henry Curtis Jackson Jr. Curtis, as everyone called him, stabbed and killed four of his nieces and nephews, all under the age of five. He also stabbed his adult sister and left another child a paraplegic for life. All of this violence was committed …