Early yesterday evening as I was watching the election coverage, I saw it on the screen: the solid South, the mass of red states in the Southeast that told me too clearly who our next president is going to be.
The Lost Cause
As I begin reading the collection of nineteenth-century Stiles letters that may provide the core of my next book, I’m brought reluctantly to remember two long ago incidents when loneliness pushed me closer to belief.
The Grip of the Past
I’ve just received word that my new short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” has won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for 2023.
My Grandmother Is Turning in Her Grave
My beloved grandmother could never have imagined that the enormous statue towering over her hometown would be pulled down, carved up and crated off to an uncertain future as it was a week ago.
The Vanguard
I am looking forward to the rare opportunity that will be offered me, and I’m looking forward with even more interest to the fascinating variety of presentations that will make up the program.
Huck and The Daughters
Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, easily his masterpiece, was published eighteen years earlier and would have given the ladies palpitations if they had dared to read it.
The Secret Bunker
A big resort in the mountains of West Virginia, called The Greenbrier, figured often in my great-grandmother Sallie’s tales of her girlhood in Richmond.
Kafka and The Littlest Rebel
Pantaloons and golden curls do not limit her temerity. It fascinates me to see that this long-forgotten children’s book seems in a strange way more modern than The Trial.
Knife, Dagger, Poignard
It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents-which only my grandmother touched-alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories.