I wrote the following piece for a memoir class taught by Michelle Wildgen, best-selling author of Bread and Butter and You’re Not You (soon to be a movie starring Hilary Swank). When I was a kid growing up in rural Tennessee, my dad determined that I would follow in his footsteps and leave a trail of dead small animals behind … Read More
The Ubiquitous Daddy Issues Club
Recently I mentioned to author Patrick Somerville (This Bright River) that Dean Bakopoulos’s first book, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, resonated with me because I have unresolved issues with my own late father. Patrick said, “Yeah, like every other writer.” It wasn’t mockery: he was saying, in essence, “Welcome to a club of which you were already a … Read More
By Request: the Music I Grew Up With
After reading The Hum and the Shiver, musician Andrew Brasfield asked me, “What kind of music did you grow up on?” Given that music is such a big part of the Tufa mythology, and that almost every one of my other books has at least some musical element or inspiration, it seemed a valid question. Being from the rural south, … Read More
Imbibing The Stornoway Way
It’s rare to find a novel with passages you want to underline as you read that’s also heart-wrenchingly sad, let alone one that has such a specific sense of time and place that it reveals some painful universals. But Kevin MacNeil’s 2005 novel, The Stornoway Way, does all these things. It’s a first-person narrative, ostensibly told to MacNeil by “R. … Read More