For lovers of the written word, the Southern Festival of Books represents a rare opportunity: a chance to hear the reflections, opinions and viewpoints of numerous writers on a multitude of subjects, from current affairs to the legacies of history. Even more irresistible is the chance to put a face with a favorite author's name, and to meet exciting new writers on their way up. This year's three-day summit, starting Friday at Legislative Plaza and the War Memorial Auditorium, will attract more than 200 such authors from around the nation.
It's the festival's 21st anniversary, and this year boasts an impressive roster of participants, from astronauts (space frontiersman and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin) to artists (Middle Tennessee native Wayne White, appearing Oct. 11). The festival will also have the customary other attractions, among them live music, an interactive children's area, cooking demonstrations, a poetry and drama stage, a children's stage with musicians, storytellers and writers, and of course numerous volumes on sale.
To help you sort through the tough choices on the schedule, the Scene offers a day-by-day guide to some of this year's highlights, along with profiles and reports on eagerly awaited titles. For more information, see the Humanities Tennessee website at humanitiestennessee.org. But for now, indulge in a reader's favorite pastime—and browse.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
INMAN MAJORS An East Tennessean by birth, Majors is a sharp-eyed writer of New South ways. In the tradition of Peter Taylor or Robert Penn Warren, he takes a long-view approach to life below the Mason-Dixon. The past—its generations of families, its politics and divisions of class—still lingers, but not so much that Majors, the author of 2004's hilarious and darkly comic Wonderdog, can't enjoy himself in the telling. In his latest book, The Millionaires, Majors employs a subtle and deft hand to offer a social commentary on the New South, a place where the sons of rural farmers are now slick bankers, and the fictional city of Glennville (think thinly veiled Knoxville) plans to host a world's fair. There's a reason The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have praised Majors' work: His voice is authentic and his storytelling energetic. 1 p.m. Friday, Room 12; 9:15 a.m. Saturday, Nashville Public Library LACEY GALBRAITH
MICHAEL SIMS Sims is something of a Renaissance man among nonfiction writers. A quick look through his list of credits at the Scene reveals articles on science, art, music, food and politics. His favorite literary realm, however, has always been the territory where nature and imagination meet. His critically acclaimed books Adam's Navel and Apollo's Fire explore the culture of the human body and the cosmos, respectively. In his new book, In the Womb: Animals, he guides readers through the reproductive processes of beasts from dogs to dolphins, aided by spectacular National Geographic photography. With his typical versatility, Sims will also be presenting The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, an anthology of Victorian and Edwardian era crime stories, edited by him and enhanced with his lively, erudite introductions. 1 p.m. Friday, Room 29; noon Sunday, Room 29 MARIA BROWNING
AMPLIFIED: FICTION FROM LEADING ALT-COUNTRY, INDIE ROCK, BLUES AND FOLK MUSICIANS In short stories, as in three-minute songs, it all comes down to the hook—the barb of language, detail or storytelling acumen that reels in the reader. The stories in this collection amount to a sampler of cutting-edge roots musicians, from Jon Langford and Robbie Fulks to Maria McKee and Rhett Miller, only the samples are of their literary rather than musical talent. (That constitutes a hook in and of itself.) Of special note are two pieces by local favorites. In David Olney's "A Sign From God," the hook is a spiritual conundrum rendered with an O. Henry twist, as a doubt-stricken Bible-school student devises a grim test of God's existence. In Mary Gauthier's "The Holiday Inn Again," it's a vernacular evocation of the inner thoughts of a girl whose mom just can't quite break it off for good with her brutish spouse. Read both with an ear cocked for the rhythms of their nighttime gigs. David Olney appears at 1:30 p.m. Friday, Café Stage; 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Room 12 JIM RIDLEY
CLAY RISEN Risen's A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination evokes the passions and tensions of the late '60s so vividly, it's hard to believe that the author wasn't yet born when angry citizens took to the streets, wreaking havoc that would shape the country's urban landscape—and its politics—for decades. With detailed descriptions of the 1968 riots and sharp insights about their political fallout, A Nation on Fire examines civil unrest that makes present-day Tea Parties and anti-globalization protests seem trivial. Risen, the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and a longtime contributor to the Scene, has woven together meticulous research and a wealth of first-person recollections to capture a pivotal moment in American race relations. 2 p.m. Friday, Room 16 MARIA BROWNING
ELIZABETH SPIRES Grown-ups shouldn't dismiss Spires' new book, I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings, simply because it carries the "Young Adult" label. The poems in this collection are monologues, a fitting poetic sub-genre because, like Michelangelo's slaves, there's a sense many of Edmondson's subjects existed previously inside the blocks of limestone he carved, struggling to be set free. Indeed, some appear at least partially to remain within the stone's confines, like one of his most famous works, a likeness of Eleanor Roosevelt wearing—or semi-attached to—a huge fur coat. Spires' poems reject the white fetishization of "outsider art" and more. Instead, they offer due reverence; and we should remember, as Wordsworth said, how much more clearly we see as children. At times Spires writes with an almost bluesy sense of "whimsy and humor," as she mentioned in a personal interview, and this quality in particular will not be lost on either children or adults. 2 p.m. Friday, Room 29 DIANN BLAKELY
KAREN WHITE A word of warning about White's latest novel, The Lost Hours: Don't read it while you're on maternity leave, as I did. Thoroughly engrossing and cleverly woven, the secrets its protagonist, Piper Mills, sets out to uncover involve a dead infant, whose body was found in the Savannah River in 1939. So reading this book while nesting a newborn isn't advisable. But that's the only caveat. As a child, Piper helped her grandfather bury a mysterious box belonging to her grandmother. When Piper finally unearths it after their deaths, its contents are hardly self-explanatory: a newspaper article about the dead black baby, torn scrapbook pages and a charm necklace. Piper, who has returned home after a fall from a horse dashed her hopes of becoming an Olympic equestrian, quickly becomes a family archaeologist, investigating the friendships, circumstances and painful secrets of her grandmother's youth. She soon learns that her grandmother Annabelle was far more complicated, and full of grief, than she ever knew. 2 p.m. Friday, Room 31 LIZ GARRIGAN
JOHN BROVEN First published in 1974, Broven's Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans remains the consummate guide to a vital period of Crescent City music history. His latest, Record Makers and Breakers, threatens to do the same for the independent recording industry of the postwar years. In Record Makers, Broven weaves together oral histories and historical events, providing a much-needed look at the infrastructure of a recording biz still in its infancy. Then (as now), the music industry lacked effective business protocols, which resulted in a Wild West-like environment ripe for wild-haired mavericks and entrepreneurs. Using extensive research and interviews—with such gunslingers as Marshall Chess, Sam Phillips and Bill "Hoss" Allen of Nashville's WLAC radio station—Broven takes us to a time when serendipity, enthusiasm and an eye for talent were all it took to make it in the music industry—that, and a little payola. 3 p.m. Friday, Room 31 PAUL V. GRIFFITH
J.T. ELLISON Ellison's hero, Taylor Jackson, is a hard-boiled, soft-shouldered Nashville homicide detective whose foxy description doesn't match anyone within 300 yards of the Central Precinct. Still, Jackson's adventures always have the ring of truth to them—perhaps that's because Ellison counts actual Metro detectives among her collaborators. In Ellison's latest adventure, The Cold Room, Jackson confronts yet another serial killer. (Who knew Music City was such a hotbed of gruesome crime?) This one, known as "The Conductor," starves his victims in a glass coffin before he has his way with them. What Jeff Lindsay's Darkly Dreaming Dexter does for Miami, Ellison's Jackson novels do for Music City. One of the book's stars is the city itself, which comes across shiny and exciting even amid scenes of cold-blooded horror. 4 p.m. Friday, Room 12; 3 p.m. Saturday, Room 16 PAUL V. GRIFFITH
MICHAEL LISTER Lister is a North Florida writer whose popular "Blood" series features John Jordan, a prison chaplain/gumshoe who inhabits the murky world between the sacred and the profane. Like the Florida Panhandle itself, Lister's stories are a conflicted mix of beauty and decay. His latest, Double Exposure, introduces us to reluctant crime photographer Remington James, whose remote wildlife camera inadvertently witnesses a horrific crime. James soon becomes the prey, as the murderer, a fish and wildlife conservation officer, pursues him into the night. A former prison chaplain himself, Lister subtly incorporates larger life issues into his work. In Double Exposure's case, garish nighttime wildlife shots become an overarching metaphor for the uncomfortable coexistence of man and nature. 4 p.m. Friday, Capitol Library PAUL V. GRIFFITH
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10
HOLLY GODDARD Jones Jones reaches beyond overwrought epiphanies and tired truths to unearth the quieter moments of clear-eyed resolve and slump-shouldered disappointment in her debut collection of short stories Girl Trouble: The kind of moments that take place at Wal-Marts, high school gymnasiums, kitchens and parking lots. Her small-town Kentucky characters swallow hard and make do between heavy doses of reality. As one character is described: "She didn't believe...in the magic of girlhood.... She had lost those notions long back, in the little house in the middle of nowhere." And nowhere is Jones' storytelling talent more evident than in the related stories "Parts" and "Proof of God." So skillfully does Jones handle the events of a college girl's murder, and the mother's subsequent grief and divorce, that the reader is nearly helpless not to feel the same sharp pity for the guilty young man who is, nevertheless, set free of his brutal crime. 9:15 a.m. Saturday, Nashville Public Library; 3 p.m. Saturday, Old Supreme Court Room ANNE DELANA REEVES
D'ARMY BAILEY Bailey's life of activism began when he left his hometown of Memphis in 1960 to attend Southern University in Louisiana. He was voted freshman class president and became an influential leader on campus, participating in sit-ins and demonstrations while earning the enmity of both angry whites in Baton Rouge and fearful officials at the college. That period and his numerous other activities on behalf of civil rights and social justice comprise Bailey's candid and often provocative new book The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist's Journey 1959-1964. The founder of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel and now a circuit court judge in Memphis, Bailey offers both personal and political fireworks, plus ample accounts of meetings and encounters with icons like James Meredith, John Lewis, the Rev. Will D. Campbell and Tom Hayden. It's a riveting account of a vital time in the nation's history. 10 a.m. Saturday, Senate Chambers RON WYNN
KEVIN WILSON The stories in Wilson's stunning debut collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth range from a Southern gothic evocative of Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor to a magic realism that lies somewhere between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and W.P. Kinsella. The best stories are the more realistic accounts of painful adolescence, such as "Go, Fight, Win," which recounts a reluctant cheerleader's odd romance with a young arsonist, and "Mortal Kombat," which tells of two AV club geeks who fall into a homosexual affair. Some of the more fantastic entries are fun but fail to achieve the human insight and emotion of other stories in the collection. The 20-something characters in the title story, for example, tunnel into a hole from which the plot can never quite escape. 10:30 a.m. Saturday, House Chambers; 4 p.m. Saturday, Room 12 MICHAEL RAY TAYLOR
A. MANETTE ANSAY Ansay's 1994 debut novel, Vinegar Hill, received the blessing of Oprah's book club in 1999, thus alerting an enormous readership to her skillful, refined literary voice. Ansay has produced seven books since Vinegar Hill, including Limbo, a memoir of the debilitating illness that has plagued her for most of her life. Her latest novel, Good Things I Wish You, is a thinking woman's romance novel. It's a narrative mosaic that combines a fictional modern love story with the tragic, real-life infatuation between Johannes Brahms and pianist Clara Schumann. The two relationships initially seem to be a study in contrasts, with the cynical contemporary lovers mired in the materialism and technology of 21st century life, while the 19th century pair live in a world fiercely dedicated to art. As their stories progress, however, the novel reveals, as one character puts it, "things about men and women that do not change." Noon Saturday, Old Supreme Court Room MARIA BROWNING
DIANN BLAKELY "Enough of God. Enough of witnesses / O turn your face to the room's wall / And sing, poor Bob." These soul-shaking first lines from Blakely's Rain At Our Door: Duets With Robert Johnson highlight her greatest strength as a poet: Blakely is absolutely fearless. Still a manuscript in progress, but already highly anticipated, Duets is a natural progression of her most recent book Cities Of Flesh and The Dead, as her "Sonnets For Tina [Turner] : A Call And Response" reveal. Blakely's long, elegant lines and sumptuous images coalesce with darker themes of pop culture, history and family, both public and private, and wrestle with the questions that have concerned the very best contemporary writers since the horrific events of the 20th century's first half : How, and where, do we find solace and pleasure, and survive in a world that continues to exile its citizens? Noon Saturday, Capitol Library ANNE DELANA REEVES
RICK BRAGG Fathers don't so much have to earn the love of sons as just accept it. That's the lesson of Rick Bragg's The Prince of Frogtown, which explores the complicated and volatile relationship he had with his handsome, self-destructive dad and the one he now has with his own stepson, who adores him despite Bragg's imperfections. The author's honesty in this biographical dig, his third book about his family, is affecting and therapeutic for both author and reader—it was Willie Morris who told Bragg long ago that he would not have clarity or calm until he took to the page about his father. Meanwhile, that a rough-and-tumble Alabama boy like Bragg could fall hopelessly and helplessly in love with a woman and claim "the boy," as he calls his stepson, as his own is optimistic and touching. Bragg's forthcoming book The Most They Ever Had is scheduled for release this month. Noon Saturday, War Memorial Auditorium LIZ GARRIGAN
KAYLIE JONES The daughter of an award-winning war novelist and a brilliant, statuesque mother, Jones grew up surrounded by family friends such as James Baldwin, William Styron and Willie Morris, and she herself would later hobnob with the likes of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and George Plimpton. But despite all of her memorable experiences and notable acquaintances, Jones also experienced the downside of celebrity life. Her revealing, sometimes shocking new memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me shows that wealth and privilege don't make dealing with alcoholism any easier, and that parental criticism can be as withering and difficult to handle as poverty and exclusion. Her love for her parents and desire to find ways of pleasing them led Jones to pursue both writing and alcohol, and each brought her periods of refuge alongside disastrous situations and events. Ultimately Jones finds the strength to beat alcoholism and comes to terms with her past, learning to savor its high points while digesting its hard lessons. Noon Saturday, Room 29 RON WYNN
JULIE KANE Does any other American city command such a reverential sense of place, identity and fierce loyalty among its citizenry than New Orleans? In Jazz Funeral, recipient of the prestigious Donald Justice Prize, former Big Easy resident Kane explores identity and attachment to place, both public and private, with grace, humor and enormous skill. Kane confronts the humiliations and imperfections of the body at middle age; the death of beloved friends and pets (her poem "Cardinal" is exquisitely heartbreaking); and her own personal Katrina—fighting and surviving cancer. The final section of Jazz Funeral, the glorious "Cutting the Body Loose," finds Ms. Kane returning to familiar, but devastated, unrecognizable ground—the walls of her former home "grown over with great roses of black mold." But Kane also finds sweet moments of hope and, in the great New Orleans tradition, celebration. Noon Saturday, Capitol Library ANNE DELANA REEVES
BUZZ ALDRIN They call him "Buzz," and for a while he earned it. Aldrin's new book, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home From the Moon, chronicles America's first lunar landing, which we learn was more harrowing than previously thought. Aldrin was one of the first humans on the moon, but his greatest challenges were waiting on the ground. Unfit for retired astronaut work—he was always a bit of a loose cannon—Aldrin rockets down a path of self-destruction that costs him two marriages and an Air Force career. Magnificent Desolation details his recovery from alcoholism and depression, with the help of current wife Lois. The book also gives Aldrin a chance to advocate for his life's work: manned space exploration, specifically a mission to Mars. Why, he asks: "Because it's there waiting to be explored." 1 p.m. Saturday, War Memorial Auditorium PAUL V. GRIFFITH
NEIL WHITE White had—or thought he had—everything: a wife, two children and a successful career as a newspaper and magazine entrepreneur. But when he was sentenced to a year in the Carville, La., minimum security prison for kiting checks to keep his Gulf Coast publishing empire and upscale lifestyle afloat, he was shocked to find himself living side by side with patients in the last leprosarium in the U.S., one to which people were at one point involuntarily confined. Though that particular form of incarceration ended 20 years ago, nearly all of those suffering from what is now referred to as "Hansen's Disease" preferred to stay rather than endure the stigma placed on them by the world beyond the "leper colony." In the Sanctuary of Outcasts follows White's journey as he learns humility and the redemption that comes with it, and takes a scarifying look at his truest self: "Finally, in a sanctuary for outcasts, I understood the truth. Surrounded by men and women who could not hide their disfigurement, I could see my own." 1 p.m. Saturday, Senate Chambers DIANN BLAKELY
RICHARD "DIXIE" HARTWELL Nashville-based Turner Publishing Co., under its Iroquois imprint, has turned out another winner, a novel of compassion and humor from Richard "Dixie" Hartwell—a pseudonym for John Lee, best-selling author of The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man and 16 other titles. Set in rural North Alabama, When the Buddha Met Bubba begins when an underemployed, out-of-luck redneck (Bubba) discovers a genie in a suitcase of unclaimed luggage. The genie turns out to be a protean figure named Pu Tai, who is ultimately revealed to be the Buddha. Together Pu Tai and Bubba embark on a journey down the Tennessee River, where they meet many colorful characters, including a gay couple, one of whom is dying of AIDS. Bubba gradually learns the Buddha's lessons and, in the end, transcends himself and reconciles himself with his life. 2 p.m. Saturday, Senate Chambers WAYNE CHRISTESON
STANLEY BOOTH Booth—author, music scholar, photographer and one of the most charming and engaging raconteurs (long before Jack White) anyone could ever have the good fortune of sharing a bottle of wine with—was present at some of the most transcendent, and reckless, moments in rock music's history: He was at Stax studios in Memphis while Otis Redding recorded the classic "Dock of the Bay," and at Altamont with the Rolling Stones. He would survive the tour to pen the all-access, critically acclaimed, and hailed by Keith Richards as "gospel," biography The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. In his elegant essay "My Mentor, My Teacher" for Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2009, Booth chronicles with respect and deep affection his long friendship with music producer Jerry Wexler, who died last year. Booth's crazy touring days are behind him now; he is content to live and write just south of Savannah with his wife, poet Diann Blakely, who's also appearing at the festival. 4 p.m. Saturday, Senate Chambers ANNE DELANA REEVES
TOMMY WOMACK The structuring, character development, comic suspense and Southern Civil War vernacular built into Womack's first novel The Lavender Boys and Elsie—a fictional imagining of an all-gay Confederate regiment told through the letters between an enlisted gay private and his sister—are all navigated like an old pro. As central character Albert Devereaux negotiates life as a gay man in the trenches of a segregated wartime South, sister Elsie faces her own private hell, and if you think his is bad, hers looks like Cinderella without the ball. Inhabiting the mind of a plucky but slowly deteriorating Southern spinster seems to have presented little challenge for Womack, whose portrait of Elsie is bizarre, genuinely funny and pitch-perfect. It's Albert's rainbow tint that gives this reader pause: Devereaux's gayness, for lack of a better word, is painted in such broad strokes that it's tantamount to a literary limp wrist. We can assume gay men did serve in the Civil War, but—assuming an entire troop's worth managed to form a regiment—would they really all love cooking, emotional expressiveness, tailoring and a good cry? 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Café Stage TRACY MOORE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11
JANNA MCMAHAN Despite its South Carolina milieu, McMahan's The Ocean Inside focuses on issues that concern everyone: life's unexpected twists and turns, the daily struggle of making dollars stretch, finding satisfaction with things that seem dreary and ordinary. While Lauren and Emmett Sullivan enjoy the trappings of success, among them a lavish Victorian beach house on Pawley's Island, they are far from happy. Fiscal and personal crises swirl around them, augmented by the usual turmoil involved in raising two daughters with their own identity problems and controversies. McMahan doesn't craft clichés, soap opera or improbable, fantastic scenarios. How her characters resolve their dilemmas and redirect their lives provides delightful and instructive reading, making The Ocean Inside a worthy successor to her 2008 novel about life in rural Kentucky, Calling Home. 1 p.m. Sunday, Room 31 RON WYNN
STUART WOODS Three things you can count on from any Stuart Woods novel: (1) unabashed product placement for Knob Creek bourbon; (2) unabashed triviality that will keep you from mentioning the book to more literary friends; (3) crisp dialogue and plot twists that will keep you up all night. His books are probably not as bad for you as home-cooked meth, but they can be as addictive. This time around, in Hothouse Orchid, Florida-police-chief-turned-CIA-agent Holly Barker is vacationing at home when she lands on the trail of a serial rapist and killer. Complicating matters is rogue agent Teddy Fay, who is after the rapist for his own reasons. When Ham Barker, Holly's ex-marine-sniper dad, wants to get involved in the chase, she tells him, "Shut up and drink your bourbon." Of course it's Knob Creek—but who cares? It's a smooth brand after all, just like Stuart Woods, and it goes down fine. 1 p.m. Sunday, War Memorial Auditorium MICHAEL RAY TAYLOR
