Tag: Reading

  • Summer Reading Begins

    Summer Reading Begins

    The semester is over, the students are heading home, some are hanging around to graduate. It rained last night, and today the clouds reign. A wonderful morning to begin summer reading. I never know what I’m going to start with. I just wander around in the library until something grabs me. And this year, once…

  • The Surgical Tool Known as Instagram

    The Surgical Tool Known as Instagram

    Here’s a little preview I made. I guess that’s what you’d call it, though it’s not for a movie. I’m tossing it out on Instagram to get folks to check out my mother’s essays here on TWB. Marketing. That’s what I’m doing. Thing is, I don’t have anything to sell. I’m using Instagram as a…

  • TWB Podcast: What Is Aesthetics? And Why Should a Writer Care?

    In class, we talk a lot about aesthetics, or the study of art–both appreciating it and creating it. It’s something the writer (the literary writer) is thinking about all the time, even if she doesn’t know she is. Walk with me into the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, where I once held a classroom with a…

  • To Read, Perchance, to Survive.

    To Read, Perchance, to Survive.

    There were always books in the house. My father, a mechanic and coal miner, loved history and science. Mom read historical novels and mysteries. Somewhere around fifth grade, I got into the James Bond series. We didn’t own any of these books; Mom and I visited the local library in Rogersville, Tennessee (population 4,802) once…

  • Psychotic Attack? Bring on the Healing

    Psychotic Attack? Bring on the Healing

    I’ve written enough, for now, about the past and its specific pains. These two weeks of blog posts have been grueling, but important, because this is the first time I’ve ever written about the toughest subjects in my life: child abuse and manic depression. Friends and family know. But I’ve never recorded, publicly, what it’s…