A friend sent me the link to this article by Patti Nickell: “Small town of Tupelo, Miss., has lots of love for native son Elvis.” Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis. My birthplace too, and the settings for my novels Until the Dawn and Tupelo. When I was born, the family was living on South Church Street …
Well, yeah, you can refuse any offer. But this one’s pretty good if you’re a book lover. I’m offering free copies of any of my books that have been on the market for more than a year (which at the moment is all of them). I can’t afford to send out print copies. What I’m …
I just discovered the writer Lewis Nordan. I should have been aware of him long ago, but I wasn’t. And then I saw an excerpt from The Sharpshooter Blues in Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader , which I recently wrote about for this blog. I hardly got started on the opening scene from The Sharpshooter …
Many years ago a “new journalist famous” famous for wearing white suits and writing non-fiction in a novelistic form wrote a book about a writer and former college wrestler named Ken Kesey who took a band of hippies on a cross-country trip in an old school bus painted in psychedelic slashes of color with the …
My identical twin and I were one, two, maybe three years old, young enough that we were still sleeping in baby cribs. Did we each have a crib or did we share one? I don’t know. My mother told me about this, and nobody who can remember is still alive, except for my sister Lynda, …
I wrote a piece on Grit Lit a little over a week ago. And then I ordered from amazon a used copy of Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader, edited by Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin, and as soon as I got it I read Franklin’s preface, and immediately I thought Shit, man, I don’t …
My wife and I have told this story a gazillion times. But maybe you missed it. It was the fall of 1973. I was working at a social service organization called Everything for Everybody. We accepted donations of all kinds of things that we gave away, we had a soup line every afternoon at 4 …
I got an email from my friend Jack Butler, author of Living in Little Rock with Miss Littlerock and other books. Jack was quite the successful writer in the ’80s and ’90s. Little Rock was published by Knopf in 1993. It was such a big deal that Bill Clinton threw a reception for Jack in …
There are countless arguments for and against the existence of God. One I think about a lot is poop. Yeah, poop. And pee. Really, God? If you’re so all-powerful and all loving, why would you make it so that every single one of us has to poop and pee—every damn day, sometimes many times a …
When I see links to advice-to-writers, I usually click on them and at least skim the articles, figuring you can never be too old, too jaded or too full of yourself to learn something new. But most of what I see in such articles is old hat, or it’s advice I’m either too lazy or …