Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is Erasure by Percival Everett, the guy who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for …
What’s in a name One of my favorite things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters—names that say something about the characters, hopefully with a bit of humor. Like Driver and Punkin, the Lumpkin twins’ parents in Tupelo. The inspiration for giving them nicknames (if I remember correctly I never called them …
Thirty years ago, give or take a few years, a couple lived on our street who would not speak to us. If we tried to engage with them in any way, even such a little a thing as to nod and smile in their direction, they would look away or stare right through us and …
I developed a rather severe infection in my left eye including a very small abscess – the eye they took the tear duct out of because of the cancer. Spending 12 hours at Urgent Care at Kaiser Permanente over two visits Friday night through Saturday afternoon included a CT scan which showed among other things …
by Alec Clayton It takes me a year or two to write a novel, which means I spend that much time getting to know each of the characters in my novels. And then I forget about them. I go on to my next novel and a new set of characters, and tend to forget the …
Satire—as if you need to be told by Alec Clayton The new film Cavorting Naked in the Dark, neither produced nor directed by legendary filmmaker John Longenbaugh, is perhaps scheduled to premiere at Olympia’s equally legendary Capitol Theater on Feb. 31. Longenbaugh, who worked on neither Titanic nor Birth of a Nation and is married …
Sometime around 1970 I was offered the job as the art teacher for the Clarkton, Mo., public school. Notice there’s no s on the end of school. There was one school for grades kindergarten through 12. I mostly taught high school with a few hours each week in the lower grades. Clarkton is in the …
The end of this month will mark the one-year anniversary of my cancer surgery. If we can believe the doctors, they got it all. No more cancer. Zap! Gone! But the aftereffects of the five surgeries I’ve had so far are not fun, and there is a promise of more to come. The most bothersome …
In the mid-1980s Gabi and I published a quarterly statewide literary/arts magazine called Mississippi Arts & Letters. I wrote a column called Publisher’s Privilege. This is the one from the premiere issue, Winter 1983-84. We are thrilled that as of this year, MA&L is in the The University of Mississippi archives.
I think I’m almost done. First, Dr. Kim at Swedish Hospital removed the cancer from my nose. It was supposed to be an outpatient operation, in and out in a few hours. But once he got inside my nose he saw that the tumor was much larger than at first thought (about one and a …