For the Greensboro (NC) Bound Literary Festival – happening now! – my good friend Bryan Giemza and I are pleased to be in conversation with writers Dennis McCarthy, Rod Davis, and John Hart about violence, storytelling, the South, and the ins and outs of thrillers and literary fiction. Check out the event online here: https://greensborobound.com/events/davis-hart-mccarthy/ […]
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Thanks to the good folks at ORION Magazine for featuring my essay about my late father, “Gaze Upon This World,” online as a Father’s Day special, with an updated introduction from me. Previously print-only, this piece (workshopped with Scott Russell Sanders at the 2016 Bread Loaf/Orion Environmental Writers Workshop) is now online. They’ve also been […]
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Thanks to Decorah News.com’s Ben Gardner (my former Paideia student!) for this lovely story about Eldorado, Iowa and how it came to be.
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Did I ever think I’d be writing the words, “My first novel is published today?” Not really. But I am. And here it is, from Bowen Press Books. As a twenty-one-year-old dreaming of being a writer, I never could have imagined I’d be sitting here (in the British Library, no less!) marking this day. Nor […]
Read moreA rerun from 2011 that’s been on my mind. Merry Christmas, y’all. — “I’ve been a pastor for more than 15 years, and I am still amazed at folks in nursing homes, many unable to remember the majority of their own lives, who will begin to sing and nod and clap when they hear Christmas […]
Read more1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. …. […]
Read moreIf I had a dollar for every time somebody, emboldened by my Southern accent, asked me a question about okra — “What is that?” when they see it growing (once somebody asked, “Is that marijuana?”), or “How do you cook it?” or “Doesn’t it get slimy?” — I’d be able to buy, well, a whole […]
Read moreAs the days shorten and daylight “savings” time – what a name! – is about to make oncoming winter even more official, I come in from canvassing for my chosen presidential candidate and turn to the stalwarts still waiting patiently out in the garden, which a little cold only improves: two kinds of kale, two […]
Read moreYou pull up to the little grocery store in a distinguished area of a small west-Georgia river city, near the country club and a ladies dress shop named after a Confederate novel. There are beautiful old homes here, and old white people of the genteel and eccentric kind that live on mostly in Southern caricature […]
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