Category: Blurb

One week, it looked like visiting authors in the River City Writers Series at the University of Memphis will be no-shows this semester, due to funding cuts. This week: better news. Robert Root, a leading name in creative nonfiction, will be making two appearances at the university.

On Thursday, October 1st, Root will teach a master class at 2 p.m. in Patterson Hall; at 7 p.m., he’ll be reading from and signing copies of his books in Mitchell Hall Auditorium.

Those books by Root include The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction and his latest, Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now. In addition to writing, teaching, and regularly visiting creative-writing programs throughout the country, Root is an editor at the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

Both of Root’s appearances at the University of Memphis are free and open to the public. For more information, call 678-4692 or write creativewriting@memphis.edu.

On writer (and current Memphian) C. Bard Cole’s latest book, the experimental This Is Where My Life Went Wrong (BLATT Books): a [Q]&A.

[Memphis. Disaster #2.]
The short explanation, why I’m living in Memphis … I’d just finished Alabama grad school, an MFA in creative writing, in the summer of 2005 and moved to New Orleans. I was going to be an instructor at Tulane. I house-sat for the summer and finally found an apartment … two weeks before Katrina hit. With two friends with me, we packed into my car and went on a cross-country jaunt across the South. We just assumed that in a few days we’d get to go back to New Orleans. But as the days wore on, it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to go back.

My friend in Memphis, Brian Pera … I’ve known him since the late 1990s. I’d met him in New York City. We had the same editor at St. Martin’s for our first books.

Brian was planning to start shooting his first movie, The Way I See Things. He had one position he could pay for and that he hadn’t filled. It was boom operator. Brian said, “Do you want to work on my movie? You can forget about New Orleans for the month or so it’ll take to shoot.” I said okay. The cinematographer on that movie, Ryan Parker, trained me to operate the boom. I had a great time.

Then I went home to Maryland to figure out what I was going to do … hoard some money. Tulane had canceled the semester. It had fired the instructors in my position … first-year writing instructor. So I worked at a commercial greenhouse in Maryland.

Then Ryan helped me get a job at WKNO in Memphis, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I started as a production assistant doing all sorts of stuff — from manual labor to working on sets to learning about editing. Now I’m in promotions and the public information department.

There’s another movie with Brian and Ryan coming up. I’m the production designer, and this time, we’re trying to be a bit more “Hollywood.” Ann Magnuson is gonna be one of our stars. I’m excited to meet her. When I was a little kid, well, not a little kid, a teenager, I used to look at Interview magazine and things I thought were cool, urban … New York. Ann was there, right in there.

It’s the beginning of another fall semester, but Memphians looking to see, hear, and talk to out-of-town authors will be disappointed — disappointed that this year the River City Writers Series at the University of Memphis has no authors, at this time, scheduled. Blame it on funding cuts, and hope that it’s short-term. It was only last March that the writers series brought Elizabeth Strout to Memphis. A month later, Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Olive Kitteridge.

Over at Rhodes College, there’s, so far, one visiting-author event slated, and it’s Thursday, September 17th. That’s when the college will host not one but three returning alumnae — Christina LaPrease, Aisha Sharif, and Caki Wilkinson — who will read from their poetry starting at 7:30 p.m. in Blount Auditorium inside Buckman Hall.

In case you don’t recognize the name Wayne White, he grew up in the 1960s on the outskirts of Chattanooga, he studied art at Middle Tennessee State University, and he was in New York City when the downtown art scene there was heating up in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He was already an accomplished cartoonist and illustrator, and he was lucky enough to join the crew as an Emmy Award-winning puppeteer and set designer on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. He also worked on music videos with Peter Gabriel (“Big Time”) and Smashing Pumpkins (“Tonight, Tonight”). A painting of White’s is a Lambchop album cover (“Nixon”).

Drop the Country Boy Act

Today, White lives in Los Angeles. His signature work: words, phrases, or whole sentences that White paints onto mass-produced thrift-store artwork — images of an ideal never-never land depicting rural America at its most surreal. As in, at left, White’s Drop the Country Boy Act.

AMMO books has recently published the coffee-table-worthy Wayne White: Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve, a monograph on the artist from the studio of designer Todd Oldham.
What follows: some questions put to and words from Wayne White.

As in: “nuclear” family in a short story called “Father Figure.” It appears in the inaugural issue of the literary magazine The Rome Review (out of Washington, D.C.; real nice website; check it out), but it appears that your standard nuclear family ain’t what it was.

True, in “Father Figure,” there’s a father, but he’s no longer married to the woman who’s the mother of their two children. When the story opens, those kids are arriving in Memphis for an extended stay with their father, who lives in Midtown. The son, age 17, barely says a word — glares is more like it when his father tries to engage him in conversation, stares is more like it when the boy is sitting glued to the set — the TV set, which, during the first few days of this visit, runs nonstop (and that includes the latest paternity battles on Maury Povich’s trash TV talk show).

The younger sister, though, is more forthcoming — and understanding — beneath her Goth exterior. She doesn’t seem bothered (or is she?) by the fact that her father is now in love and living with a man who is 15 years his junior, which may or may not be a problem for everybody involved: ex-husband, ex-wife, two children, and a guy who maybe missing the club scene, gay division. The problem here, definitely: the arrival of the son’s girlfriend with some news. That’s not all that’s a problem, though. Read “Father Figure” to find out.

And to find out some background on the story, here’s Marshall Boswell, the author and associate professor in the English Department at Rhodes College, in his own words — on “Father Figure” in particular and the art of the short story in general:

Did Abraham pimp Sarah? Was Onan a jerk? Did King David have a potty mouth? And were Samson and Delilah into S&M?

Those are the pressing questions asked, and answered, in The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book, which is out in paperback this month from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The book’s authors, professors John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie, both of Rhodes College, with the help of reporter (and satirist) Joel Kilpatrick, do a hell of a job mixing bona fide scholarship and good-hearted humor, and “funny as hell” is how one reviewer described it last year. Here’s how the Flyer saw it.

Leave it to Kaltner, McKenzie, and Kilpatrick, though, to have the final say on a question that’s had other scholars stumped: Does the Bible or does it not command bikini waxing?

First there was the fall of the dot-coms. Then there was the fall of Enron. Yesterday, there was the sentencing of Bernard Madoff to 150 years in prison. But now, it’s time for the fall of Core Communications: the fictionalized big-business scam at the heart of Memphian Eric Barnes’ debut novel, Shimmer (Unbridled Books).

Barnes is discussing and signing copies of Shimmer at Davis-Kidd Booksellers today, June 30th, starting at 6 p.m. Just don’t expect the author to be quitting his day job anytime soon. (He’s publisher of the Memphis Daily News and the Memphis News.) And don’t think of Shimmer as another corporate thriller. Barnes doesn’t see it that way. Here’s why. And here’s more.

“I thought I knew you better than anyone, but after reading your book, I realize I didn’t know you at all. Now I love you even more.”

That’s Dolly Parton speaking to her agent, Sam Haskell, and she’s referring to Haskell’s book (written with the help of David Rensin), Promises I Made My Mother (Ballantine Books). But Parton was far from being Haskell’s only and biggest client at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, where he worked — from the mailroom fresh out of Ole Miss to heading the company’s worldwide television division — for 26 years.

Count, among Haskell’s clients and in no particular order: George Clooney, Bill Cosby, Kathie Lee Gifford, Ray Romano (the Gomer Pyle reference above appears in Romano’s foreword to the book), Whoopi Goldberg, Nell Carter, Debbie Allen, Delta Burke, Martin Short, Kirstie Alley, Tony Danza, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Swoosie Kurtz, Lucie Arnaz, and His Royal Highness the Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex (youngest son of Queen Elizabeth).

And count, among the TV shows Haskell is most proud to have been behind and in no particular order: The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Mad About You, Everybody Loves Raymond, Lost, Murphy Brown, Sisters, Suddenly Susan, Live with Regis & Kathie Lee, King of Queens, and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?.

What’s a guy from Amory, Mississippi (pop. 7,000, not far from Tupelo) doing in such company and behind such shows? He’s doing his best to honor the lessons taught by his mother, as promised in the title of his book. Haskell will be signing at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Monday, June 22nd, at 6 p.m.

And note: All proceeds from the sale of the book go directly to the author’s favorite charities, among them the Rotary Foundation of America. Why the Rotary? Because, as Haskell said with a laugh in a recent phone conversation, “I was Rotary Boy of the Year in 1973!”

Here, in his own words: Sam Haskell.

L.R. Clothier on Union is known for its cut. But Saturday it’ll be all about the “cutthroat world of publishing” when author Joy “Deja” King heads a meet-and-greet writers’ workshop on how to publish, how to market, and basically how to make it in today’s challenging book business.

June 16th: It’s Bloomsday, the day that admirers of James Joyce meet to celebrate Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which takes place in Dublin on that date. And starting around 5 p.m., it takes place in Memphis when Celtic Crossing, the Irish bar/restaurant in Cooper-Young, celebrates too with music, food, and costumes inspired by the novel and readings drawn directly from the book.

Thanks to local actors Eddy Thornton, Michael Vale, and Rick Crowe, Memphians can watch a scene out of Ulysses set, appropriately enough, in a Dublin pub. Thanks to Rhodes College student Alicia Queen, Memphians can hear as Molly Bloom rhapsodizes stream of consciously in the novel’s famous (and infamous) closing chapter.

Reginald Moore “channels” Molly’s husband, Leopold Bloom, in another reading from the book. And thanks to husband-and-wife Ron Evans and Mary Lowe-Evans, we’ll hear from husband-and-wife Molly and Leopold in a reading drawn from the novel’s “Calypso” episode.

“Bloomsday” in Memphis is thanks to Celtic’s owner, DJ Naylor, and Mary Lowe-Evans, who have worked to organize this first citywide celebration of Joyce. What’s this got to do, though, with the “bride” of Frankenstein?

Lowe-Evans, a Joyce scholar, has also written on Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, which was based on a “waking dream” Shelley had on the shores of Lake Geneva. She was in the company of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, and they spent their vacation time telling ghost stories and talking late into the night — talking, among other things, about the possibility of animating dead matter. But as Mary Shelley later recalled: “It proved a wet, ungenial summer and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” (You want rain, thunder, lightning, and Byron at his looniest? See here.)

Sounds like the ungenial summer Memphis is having, what with last Friday’s winds, rain, and power outages. But there’s good reason to remember Mary Shelley’s “waking dream.” The year was 1816. The day was June 16th.