Author: Leonard Gill

The fall 2014 issue of The Pinch, the literary journal produced twice a year by the creative writing program at the University of Memphis, is here, and there’s a party to celebrate with music, food, and, this being a literary crowd, a trio of readings. The event is Friday, October 24th, starting at 7 p.m. at Amurica (410 N. Cleveland).

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The latest volume of The Pinch draws from the work of short-story writers, essayists, and poets from all over the map (e.g., Austin, Brooklyn, Denver, Fort Worth, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington, D.C.), but among the visual artists featured, several are locally based or connected: Brandon Dill (photographer for The Commercial Appeal), working alone and in collaboration with Rebecca Parker, and painters Tyler Hildebrand, Christan Mitchell, and Anne Siems. Gary Golightly, of the University of Memphis, again provides the art for the issue’s front and back covers.

According to Eric McQuade, fiction editor for this year’s fall issue of The Pinch, music by the band Purvis will kick things off at Friday night’s party, and the food truck Hot Mess Burritos will be on hand. Also on hand: three writers reading from their work:

In the fiction category, Gabriel Houck (represented in this Pinch issue), who’s in the creative writing program at the University of Nebraska and at work on his first short-story collection; in the poetry category, Tara Mae Mulroy, graduate of the University of Memphis MFA program and whose chapbook Philomela came out last January; and in the creative nonfiction category, Emily Rich of Arlington, Virginia, whose “On the Road to Human Rights Day” was listed as a notable entrant in The Best American Essays of 2014.

For more information on the Pinch party on Friday night, contact Eric McQuade at mmcqade1@memphis.edu. •

What is college for? With acceptance into America’s top schools more competitive than ever and with the cost of a traditional college education — and student debt — climbing to unheard-of heights, no time like the present to ask the question. Students and parents are asking it in record numbers. Educators too.

One of those educators is William Deresiewicz, who in 2008 wrote an essay for The American Scholar, the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” That essay, the author claims, has been viewed online more than a million times.

But Deresiewicz wasn’t finished with the question of college. Nor were readers. In August 2014, Free Press published Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, and an excerpt from that book, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” (subhead: “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies”), is reported to be the most read article in the hundred-year history of The New Republic.

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Put aside Deresiewicz’s talent for attention-grabbing headlines and heated rhetoric, though. One thing’s clear: “Deresiewicz believes that colleges and universities should restore the liberal arts to the center of the curriculum, with the humanities at the center of the liberal arts,” writes Mount Holyoke professor Christopher Benfey, who provides the above backstory on Deresiewicz in his excellent review of Excellent Sheep in the October 23rd issue of The New York Review of Books — “restore” because in the minds of some, the usefulness of a liberal arts education is being seriously questioned in favor of more pragmatic coursework. The postmortems aren’t hard to find.

“The division between vocational and liberal arts education … is today tilting further and further in favor of the vocational,” writes Joseph Epstein (former editor of The American Scholar) in “The Death of the Liberal Arts,” a 2012 essay originally published as “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?” in The Weekly Standard and included in Epstein’s A Literary Education (published in June by Axios Press). “Even within the liberal arts,” Epstein continues, “more and more students are, in [Columbia professor Andrew] Delbanco’s words, ‘fleeing from “useless” subjects to “marketable” subjects such as economics,’ in the hope that this will lend them the practical credentials and cachets that might impress prospective employers.”

“Useless subjects”? Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, wants students, parents, and educators to think again. As Roth writes in the introduction to his book Beyond the University (published this past May by Yale University Press):

“Beyond the University argues that the demand that we replace broad contextual education meant to lead to lifelong learning with targeted vocational undergraduate instruction is a critical mistake, one that neglects a deep American tradition of humanistic education that has been integral to our success as a nation and that has enriched the lives of generations of students by enhancing their capacities for shaping themselves and reinventing the world they will inhabit.”

Roth writes a few pages later, it’s worth quoting in full:

“This book steps back from current debates concerning technology and cost to argue that the calls for a more efficient, practical college education are likely to lead to the opposite: men and women who are trained for yesterday’s problems and yesterday’s jobs [emphases added], men and women who have not reflected on their own lives in ways that allow them to tap into their capacities for innovation and for making meaning out of their experience. Throughout American history calls for practicality have really been calls for conformity — for conventional thinking. If we heed them now it will only impoverish our economic, cultural, and personal lives.”

That is just one reason why, according to Roth, liberal education matters, and “Why Liberal Education Matters” — the subtitle of Beyond the University — will be the subject of Roth’s lecture at Rhodes College on October 23rd. It’s a lecture that will serve as keynote to the “Gateways to the Liberal Arts” conference at Rhodes, which runs Thursday through Saturday.

Needless to say, Ralph Waldo Emerson won’t be at that conference. His spirit very likely will be. It was Emerson, Roth reminds us in Beyond the University, who delivered a lecture called “The American Scholar” at Harvard in 1837. (The occasion: Phi Beta Kappa Day.) And it was Emerson who reminded listeners on that day that “[e]ducation teaches one not to follow the crowd but to discover one’s own way: notice everything yet imitate nothing,” Roth writes. “The independent, educated person is able to ‘resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism.’”

“Vulgar prosperity”? Emerson got that right. You read today of unapologetic displays by (and the political influence of) the rich and super-rich. “Barbarism”? Emerson right again. You listen every day to “what passes for discourse in our decidedly uncivil public sphere,” in Roth’s measured assessment.

And it’s a measure of Roth’s skill that he can communicate, despite Beyond the University’s modest length, the whole history of higher education in America — an evolving, often contentious history of intellectual debate as old as the Founding Fathers — in such readable, even entertaining terms.

A liberal arts education: Far from its value in the past, Roth shows it to be especially needed now — inside the classroom and beyond, for the betterment of the individual and for the good of us all. Roth’s closing chapter, “Reshaping Ourselves and Our Societies,” alone should be, as a syllabus might put it, required reading. •

Michael Roth will be lecturing at Rhodes College on Thursday, October 23rd, inside the McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center at 6 p.m. Reception at 5:30 p.m.; book signing to follow the lecture.

Roth’s talk — free and open to the public — is part of Rhodes’ “Communities in Conversation” series (Facebook.com/Communities.in.Conversation; on Twitter, @Rhodes_CiC). For a discussion of Beyond the University, go to the interview that Jonathan Judaken, the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes, had with Roth on WKNO-FM’s Counterpoint program.

Interested in learning more on the state of the liberal arts? Scott Newstok, associate professor in the English department at Rhodes and past president of the school’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, has passed along a whole handful of recent links, brought to you by Bookforum.

Cher singing “Half-Breed”; hot rollers; Tab; “Laura” (from General Hospital); shag carpeting; ponchos; daredevil Evel Knievel; bank robber Patty Hearst: That’s right, the 1970s — and writer Darcey Steinke grew up during them. A young teenager named Jesse grows up during them in Sister Golden Hair (Tin House Books), the new novel from Steinke, who lives today in New York but who once served as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi.

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Jesse, age 12 when Sister Golden Hair opens, has more on her mind than Cher, Evel, and Patty, however: Her bell-bottomed father has been dismissed as a Methodist minister, gone New Age-y, and moved the family to Roanoke, Virginia, where he works as a counselor in a VA hospital, moonlights as a group-therapy leader, and grows his hair. Jesse’s mother, according to her watchful daughter, is quietly, sometimes not so quietly, freaking out — when, that is, she is not following news reports of the glamorous Kennedys. Jesse’s brother, Phillip, is eight years her junior, so what does he know? He’s just a kid. Jesse, for her part, is just trying to negotiate the “purgatory” that is the Bent Tree subdivision of duplexes in Roanoke and wondering about the precise meaning of “lezzbo,” an all-purpose word on the lips of a lot of the kids at Low Valley Junior High, where if times aren’t exactly tough, keeping up appearances can be:

“It wasn’t only clothes that I had to worry about. I also had to follow the accessory trends,” Jesse says with the accuracy of a social scientist. “Since I’d begun paying attention, there’d been a plastic belt fad, a color barrette fad, and a toe ring fad. These fads could not be dismissed and not only did you have to participate in them, you also had to be at the right place inside the fad, not the trailblazer who first showed up in jeans with teardrop pockets or striped toe socks, but around the fifteenth or twentieth. If you waited, you could be made fun of for jumping on the bandwagon. Then the items might actually hurt you instead of helping your status.”

Status: Jesse’s despairing mother — a largely absent but desperate presence throughout the novel — obsesses over it. Jesse is forced to come to terms with it because of a seventh-grade trend-setter named Shelia, who dresses like Julie from The Mod Squad, and a friend named Jill, a sexual adventuress whose mother goes missing, then Jill goes missing. Rumors at school are that Jill ran away with a pot dealer, or was kidnapped by bikers and taken to Mexico, or drowned in Tilden Lake, where, according to legend, a dead girl lives in an underwater cave made of amethyst. By late junior high, though, Shelia’s finally a friend of Jesse’s too, if your idea of friendship includes sexual humiliation, locking Jesse inside a clothes closet, and teaching Jesse the art of cocktail-waitressing Playboy Bunny style.

“Girl types” (according to Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue): Jesse’s learning here too: Natural, Hippie, Disco, and Preppy. She’s learning from Sandy, the sun-bathing, potty-mouth adult neighbor with serious man problems, and from Julie, the alcoholic neighbor (and former Miss North Carolina) who owns the High Style Dance Academy. Jesse’s learning to rid her 12-year-old mind of magical forest creatures and live, if possible, inside her own skin and accept the sight of her own changing body. She also wonders throughout Sister Golden Hair about God’s presence in the world. Or is He hidden from the world? Or maybe somewhere in between?

“At times I still felt the open God feeling, not so much in objects but in the space around them, like in the space around the couch or the area between the lamp and my bed: it was in that vacuum that something might happen,” Jesse says. But years later, God’s absent altogether, as when the family is set to move up in the world and out of Bent Tree and Jesse is arriving at a deeper self-understanding:

“Between me and everything there was a space, like an enormous canyon I could never hope to bridge or cross. It was like I was dead. A ghost girl didn’t need to worry about being popular, and it didn’t matter if she was sitting beside the freakiest girl in the whole school.”

That freaky girl is Pam, who is wise beyond her years because she’s had to be.

Jesse’s health-class topic at Cave Spring High is on shampoo buildup. Pam, who was supposed to discuss highlighting your hair with lemon juice, instead demonstrates her makeup routine to hide a purple-red birthmark that would mortify most girls. But during Pam’s talk, a space seems to open up for Jesse again — a space that is “rawer and realer” and free of the things that had worried her before and free of the faith she thought could sustain her. So that by the time Jesse is asked to participate in Jill’s baptism — yes, Jill’s — Jesse wants to shout no to the minister’s question: “Do you give yourself completely to the Lord?”

“Say you want yourself all for your own self. Say that you have no specific country, say that you are important without any story from above, say that your home is with me and the other girls up in the sky,” Jesse wants to say to Jill as she watches Jill go under, her hair free and floating, her robe soaked and outlining her girl body, like those girls who captivated Jesse in the pages of Vogue, their hair free and floating too, clothes clinging, and like perhaps the hair and clothing of that dead girl who lives at the bottom of Tilden Lake.

Sister Golden Hair, even without an overarching narrative — Steinke has said she sees the story in “phases” — captivates too in its strange mixture of the mundane and the fantastical, the pop-cultural and the metaphysical, and it’s very much in the mode of Steinke’s earlier, memorable novel Jesus Saves, the root question in both novels being: Does He? The God question being: Where is He? •

Darcey Steinke will be reading from and signing Sister Golden Hair at Burke’s Book Store (936 S. Cooper; 278-7484) on Thursday, October 16th, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The reading starts at 6 p.m.

Do you know that a wine bottle fits perfectly inside the drawer of an old-fashioned library card catalog?

If you don’t know, you’ll find out during the “wine pull,” one of several events lined up for Libration 2014, the two-day fund-raising series of events put on by the Memphis Library Foundation and co-sponsored by Memphis magazine, sister publication of the Memphis Flyer. This year’s Libration is Thursday and Friday, October 16th and 17th, and it comes in three “chapters.”

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“Chapter One” will take place at the Galloway Mansion in Midtown, and it will include a meet-and-greet with this year’s Libration guest author, Jess Walter, who will be on hand to chat with partygoers and sign copies of his best-selling, critically acclaimed novel Beautiful Ruins. Heavy hors d’oeuvres from Bari Ristorante’s Chef Jason Severs — in keeping with the novel’s Italian setting — along with fine wines and an open bar are included in the “Chapter One” ticket price of $200 per person.

“Chapter Two” — free and open to the public — takes place Friday morning. Beginning at 11 a.m., Walter will speak at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library (3030 Poplar), meet with readers, and sign his book.

“Chapter Three” on Friday night — 7 to 10:30 p.m. — continues at the Central Library with another party. Tickets are $75 per person (or $125 per person for the VIP treatment, which includes champagne, an open bar, and gift bags). The celebration will include: live music; a silent auction; a photo booth; a food buffet; a beer garden; a costume contest (come dressed, if you’d like, as your favorite book character); personalized poetry typed on the spot by Adam Maldonado (aka “Adam the Poet”); a signature cocktail, One Flew Over the Cosmo’s Nest (designed especially for the evening by Bari bartender Brad Pitts); a “flaming donut” dessert from Wade & Company Catering; a “silent disco” (shhh, this is a library, so dancer earphones, together with a choice of play lists, provided); and that card-catalog wine pull.

Think of the wine pull as a takeoff on the TV game show Concentration, and call it “Libration Concentration.” Diane Jalfon, executive director of the Memphis Library Foundation, does.

“A guest pays for a chance to pull the drawers of the card catalog to see if they can match the wines inside,” Jalfon explained by phone late last week. “Pull two drawers containing the same two wines, and you win both bottles. It’s a perfect concentration game.”

Libration is a perfect way to donate to the Memphis Public Library — and have fun while you’re doing it. This year, your participation will help fund the library’s citywide system and in particular the future Teen Learning Lab at the Central Library, which Jalfon said is very much in the works.

“The big emphasis right now is on the Teen Learning Lab we’re building,” Jalfon said. “It’s a big project and the first capital project we’ve done since building the Central Library. We’re breaking ground on it in December, and we reached our construction goal of $1.5 million as of last week. But we still have technology dollars and programming dollars to raise.”

Last year’s Libration was the first such celebration — a brand-new concept, a brand-new everything, according to Jalfon. “We netted almost $40,000, which isn’t bad for a first year,” she said. “But we’re hoping to increase that amount this year.”

And this year, it’s author Jess Walter who’s been invited to appear, and who knew there was such a strong Memphis connection with that best-selling author?

“Members of the board were tossing around names of different authors we’d like to invite to Libration, and someone mentioned Jess Walter,” Jalfon said. “Kate Duignan [wife of former Commercial Appeal editor Chris Peck and a library foundation board member] said, ‘Oh, I know him.’ We all looked at her, stunned. Kate said, ‘I made his wife’s wedding dress!’

“Kate, who designs part time, and Chris are from the Spokane, Washington, area, as is Jess. Jess, in fact, used to work for the paper there.

“Jess was on our wish list. So he seemed the perfect choice. Jess keeps up a busy schedule, but he’s a big library advocate too. He agreed to come.”

Memphians of all ages come to the Central Library. “Our library is very well used,” Jalfon said, and to prove it, she cited a surprising statistic:

“More people visit the library annually than attend all Grizzlies games, all U of M football and basketball games, the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, the Southern Heritage Classic, Graceland, and the Memphis Zoo combined.”

By late last week, Jalfon was attending to loose ends: getting auction items ready for Libration 2014, selling tickets. And there’s another end still loose: Jalfon’s own outfit for Friday night’s literary costume contest. “Well,” she said when asked what she had in mind, “I’m still trying to decide.” •

For tickets to Libration 2014, go to memphislibraryfoundation.org and click on “Donation Center” or call the library at (901) 415-2831. To follow the Facebook page of Libration 2014, go here.

And don’t forget: The next semiannual Friends of the Library Book Sale is Friday and Saturday, October 24th and 25th, at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. More than books, however, the sale includes donated records, cassettes, magazines, videos, and CDs — books and other items individually priced from $2 on down to 25 cents. For more on the sale and hours, go to memphislibrary.org/whatsnew.

This much we know: Alice Mitchell and Frederica (“Freda”) Ward were more than intimate friends after they met at the Higbee School for Young Ladies in Memphis. The school’s official aim was “The Systematic Development of True Womanhood.” But by the time Alice was 19 and Freda was 17, they’d taken the acceptable practice of “chumming” (as such close friendships between young women were called) to unacceptable lengths: With Alice dressed as a man, they planned to get married in Memphis then move to St. Louis.

Ada — Freda’s eldest sister and surrogate mother — discovered the plan, as spelled out in letters between Alice and Freda, before the couple could elope. Then Freda, drawn by the attentions of two men, began to distance herself from Alice, who tried repeatedly and without success to earn back Freda’s affections. So, one winter day, Alice took action.

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On the Memphis riverfront, near what was the downtown customs house, Alice approached Freda, who was returning home upriver to the town of Golddust, Tennessee. Looking as if to kiss Freda’s cheek, Alice pulled out her father’s razor and cut Freda’s face. Freda ran, but Alice caught up with her, and she sliced Freda’s throat. The date was February 25, 1892.

A woman marrying another woman? More than unnatural — as it was judged to be by the people of Memphis and by newspaper readers across the country — the marriage of Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward was thought to be insane. Which is how the jury, after deliberating for 20 minutes, found Alice: guilty of murder and “presently insane.” She was moved to the West Tennessee Hospital for the Insane in Bolivar, Tennessee, where she lived for a few more years — official cause of death to this day unknown. Some at the time said consumption. Some thought suicide. Alice was 25.

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“Miss Alice Mitchell’s Lunacy, Counsel Have Confidence That Erotomania Can Be Established, The Perverted Affection of One Girl for Another”: That’s how a headline in the Memphis Appeal-Avalanche newspaper read during Alice Mitchell’s trial.

“… [T]he slave of a passion not normal and almost incomprehensible to well-balanced people”: That’s how the Memphis Appeal-Avalanche described Alice herself.

And here are some of the findings of a doctor, who observed Alice in the Memphis jail: “There is a lack of symmetry in the facial conformation … She is left-handed … At puberty she displayed symptoms of excitability … She always found boys more congenial as playmates than girls … She was the victim of an insane but an imperative delusion … She intended to commit suicide, but forgot … She is too dangerous to be turned loose on the community … She dominated the mind of Freda Ward.”

Alice Mitchell also dominated the mind of Sarah Bernhardt, who was performing in Memphis at the time of the trial. She asked to visit Alice in jail but never did. She thought of collaborating on an opera based on the story of Alice and Freda, but it was never realized.

Others observed the relationship between the two women in less artistic terms: Krafft-Ebing, the Austrian psychiatrist, in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886); Havelock Ellis, the English sexologist, in his notes on sexual inversion. But as recently as March 2014, Sonja Livingston, of the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis, wrote of Alice and Freda in “Mad Love: The Ballad of Fred & Allie” in Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly.

According to Alexis Coe in the new book Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (Zest Books), it was men behaving badly too. Coe — historian, former research curator in the exhibitions department at the New York Public Library, and contributor to The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Slate, SF Weekly, and The Awl and The Millions websites — doesn’t excuse Alice Mitchell’s crime. What she does do in Alice + Freda Forever is paint a picture of late-19th-century Memphis (and America in general) that is male-dominated, class-conscious, and racist to the extreme. Journalist Ida B. Wells certainly saw the city, the South, and the country in those terms. Wells was writing on race relations — and lynchings — in Memphis at the time of Freda’s murder. And rumored to be implicated in a particularly vicious case of white-on-black violence the year of Alice’s trial was Judge Julius DuBose, who presided at Alice’s court hearings.

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Was the love between Alice and Freda “purely mental,” as Alice’s defense attorney maintained? But, more importantly, who was Alice Mitchell?

“Why did she kill Freda Ward? Was she a masculine murderess? A pervert? A fast and jealous young woman? Or was she insane, like her mother?”

That’s Alexis Coe doing the asking in Alice + Freda Forever, but those are the same questions that the public, the Associated Press, the New York World, and The San Francisco Chronicle were asking too. Coe answered some of those questions in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco.

“I’m often asked if Freda was a lesbian,” Coe said. “At the time of the murder, they didn’t have the words we use today. ‘Lesbian’ was still 40 years away, and without this knowledge or without saying that either Freda or Alice had a desire for another woman except for one another, I can’t actually say that either of them were lesbians. But I do think Alice loved Freda to an obsessive extent. And while I think she was a scorned lover, I also think she was an unstable person waiting for a trigger.

“Freda loved attention. At the time, Freda was also corresponding with — in her own word, ‘loving’ — a couple of other men. She even mentions that she’s in love with three people at once, but she loves Alice best.

“Alice clearly wanted the rights of a husband, but she never said she wanted to be a man. I think she wanted control over Freda, and Freda plays the Victorian woman well. I really do think Alice wanted to pass as a man. She wanted to have experiences outside the home. She wanted to work. And every time I reread the letters between them, I’d get excited about their plan to elope. But I’d also be very concerned about the curious choices they were making.

“They were going to adopt the Ward name, for example, which would have made them very easy to track down in St. Louis. And if they’d gotten to St. Louis, I’m not sure anything would change between them. I think they were going to be plagued by jealousy and infidelity. Ideally, in my mind, Alice would have gone on to enjoy her new life, passing as a man. Freda [who dreamed of working on the stage] maybe joins the theater and goes on tour.”

This week, Alexis Coe is Memphis for interviews with local media and, on October 9th, for the official launch of Alice + Freda Forever at the Booksellers at Laurelwood. In her research for the book, Coe got to know the city well. Early on, Memphian Vincent Astor led her on a tour of Elmwood Cemetery and the city’s waterfront when Coe admits that she’d yet to get her bearings. But she got them soon enough thanks to the Memphians she met during her research:

“I have visited many archives, but the archivists and librarians in Memphis … all of them were welcoming. They sent me emails. They referred me to others. The people in Memphis were really supportive, really wonderful.”

But aside from the archivists and librarians, Coe found few in town who’d heard of this story. Truth be told, Coe wasn’t aware of it either until it came to her attention when she was still a graduate student. As she writes in her introduction to Alice + Freda Forever, she was riding a New York City subway when she first read of it — a story so gripping that Coe missed not one but three of her subway stops. She’s been engrossed in the story of Alice and Freda ever since, and as she said in our interview, her “obsession with this case informed my research. I had a time line. I knew what to read as false and what to read as true. But often what was false had a very intimate relationship with what was true.

“My greatest challenge was the lack of information after Alice went into the asylum in Bolivar. I never heard her ‘voice’ again. That’s haunted me. And exactly how Alice died is unknowable. I think she committed suicide. But I did have access to the letters of Alice and Freda as they were introduced at the time in newspaper reports and court documents.”

Readers of Alice + Freda Forever have access to some of those materials too in illustrated form. Thanks to the drawings by Sally Klann, readers have a better sense of who these individuals were, their appearance, and the times they lived in. The illustrations were part of Coe’s plan for the book from the beginning:

“After grad school, I started working at the New York Public Library. I saw how archival material really did engage visitors and how it could enhance a story. So I started to think in terms of an illustrated narrative history for my book. Back in 2011, I told my publisher that I’d like a hundred illustrations, and they were willing to adhere to my vision so readers could ‘interact’ with the story, see the love letters [rewritten for the book in long hand] and the ephemera from the lives of Alice and Freda. The actual letters between them have been lost to time or destroyed. But the last known letter — the one that Alice had on her when she attacked Freda, the letter that was bloodied during the attack — could not be located in the Shelby County Archives.”

And until recently, the grave of Frederica Ward in Memphis’ Elmwood Cemetery did not have anything marking it, not even a headstone. Coe said that a tree has been planted at the spot. Who planted it, she isn’t sure. One thing for sure: With Coe’s book, Elmwood should see more visitors asking about the location of Freda’s grave. When visitors find it, they won’t have far to look to find Alice Mitchell’s as well, because she’s buried in Elmwood too. Alice and Freda forever indeed. •

Alexis Coe will be discussing and signing Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on Thursday, October 9th, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

The first half of October is shaping up to be a good time for readings from university-affiliated writers.

First up: On Friday, October 3rd, John Bensko — winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1981, a Fulbright professor at the University of Alicante in Spain, and (closer to home) creative writing teacher at the University of Memphis — will be reading from his fourth poetry collection, Visitations (University of Tampa Press). The reading begins at Burke’s Book Store at 6 p.m., but Bensko will be on hand to meet his readers and sign his book beginning at 5 p.m. Discover for yourself what native Memphian and nationally recognized poet Richard Tillinghast meant when he said of Visitations: “I rejoice that poetry this good is still being written.”

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“Mostly what I do is exercise my lungs in praise of everything”: That’s Marcus Wicker in his poem “The CEO of Happiness Speaks” from his debut collection Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial), winner of the 2011 National Poetry Series Prize.

Wicker, assistant professor of English at the University of Indiana and poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review, will be exercising those lungs — with the ring of Whitman and in praise of subjects such as Pam Grier and RuPaul? — when he reads from his work at Rhodes College on Tuesday, October 7th, at 7 p.m. The event is inside Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall on the Rhodes campus.

And in mid-October, on the campus of the University of Memphis, the River City Writers Series will be welcoming novelist and nonfiction writer John Griswold, who teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University in Louisiana and edits The McNeese Review. You may know Griswold by another name, however: Oronte Churm.

But no mistaking Griswold’s latest collection of essays, Pirates You Don’t Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life (University of Georgia Press). Look for Griswold to be dipping into that collection when he reads inside the Bluff Room in the U of M’s University Center on Wednesday, October 15th, at 8 p.m. As with all River City Writers authors, an interview with Griswold will take place in the U of M’s Patterson Hall the following day at 10:30 a.m. •

Do you have a short story on hand? One that you’re polishing up? Or one that you have in mind? Now is the time to act. As just announced by Marilyn Sadler, senior editor at Memphis magazine, here are the rules for that publication’s 2015 short story contest for Mid-South writers. Contest cosponsors are The Booksellers at Laurelwood and Burke’s Book Store.

According to Sadler’s post on the “901” blog at Memphis magazine, the winning story will earn a $1,000 grand prize and will be published in a future issue of Memphis. Two honorable mention awards of $500 each will be given if the quality of entries warrants.

Below are contest rules.

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1. Authors must live within 150 miles of Memphis.

2. Entries should be postmarked by February 1, 2015.

3. You may submit more than one story, but each entry must be accompanied by a $10 entry fee, with checks or money orders payable to Memphis magazine.

4. Each story should be typed, double-spaced, with unstapled, numbered pages. Stories should be between 3,000 and 4,500 words long. To avoid disqualification, please respect the maximum length.

5. Stories are not required to have a Memphis or Southern theme.

6. With each story should be a cover letter that gives us your name, address, phone number/email, and the title of your story. Please do NOT put your name anywhere on the manuscript itself.

7. Manuscripts may be previously published as long as previous publication was not in a national magazine with over 20,000 circulation or in a regional publication within Shelby County.

8. Manuscripts should be sent to FICTION CONTEST, c/o Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101. NOTE: We cannot accept faxes or emails. Authors wishing their manuscripts returned must include a self-addressed stamped envelope with each entry.

Winners will be contacted by April 2015. If you have further questions, contact Marilyn Sadler at sadler@memphismagazine.com. •