Collaboration

If you know me, you know I love the Southern Festival of Books. It happens annually on the second weekend in October in Nashville, out on the Legislative Plaza, in War Memoiral Auditorium, in the Capitol Building, and in the session rooms below.  Friday, Saturday, and Sunday writers from all over come to Nashville to read to an audience and talk about their books. It's all free. And if you want to buy books, well they're for sale and they're tax free at the Humanities Tennessee table. 

Reading is something that takes place between the reader and writer. I writer creates a world as best she can and then offers it up to the reader. The first sentence is the key to unlock the door. Stephen King talks about this activity as a kind of telepathy. The writer gives the reader an opportunity to witness something, and what the writer sees is transformed in the act of reading to something informed by everything the reader has ever seen, or heard, or smelled, everything he has ever experienced, all his baggage and prejudices and fears and hopes.  It's really a very magical event, reading is. And at the Southern Festival, or at any public reading, that magic happens in the same room, the telepath bridging what the writer sees and what the reader sees. I love it!

My life with books :

I was a slow reader and when I was young, I often backed away from big books with lots of pages. I got over that. My home is full of books, shelved and stacked and sometimes pretending to be furniture. They each in their turn transport me to someplace only that book can take me.

And of course my favorite writers are my best teachers when it comes to writing. But I also read some books because they are just fun.

I've just read:

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Going Away Shoes, Jill McCorkle

Chronical of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

What I'm about to read:

Eli the Good, by Silas House

Lark and Termite, Jane Anne Phillips

Serena, Ron Rash

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

A few of my favorite novels:

Fair and Tender Ladies and Saving Grace, Lee Smith

If You Want Me To Stay, Michael Parker

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Sharpshooter Blues and Wolf Whistle, Lewis Nordan

Lonesome Dove and Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry

Father and Son and Joe, Larry Brown

Floatplane Notebooks, Clyde Edgerton

Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons

Child of God, Cormac McCarthy

For another great reading list, check out Oxford American's author poll of the ten best southern novels of all time, the five best southern nonfiction books, the best southern novel of all time, and the most overlooked southern novel of all time.  Then look at all the books folks voted on that didn't win! It's a great reading list!

READING GROUPS

Book clubs or reading groups are wonderful! They allow us share stories regularly and more fully enjoy the experience of a book or come to a deeper understanding of its meaning, and to get to know each other better through literature. Whether we read stories that resonate with our own experience or stories that open a door on an experience foreign to us, we are enriched by the books we read. That sharing of story with each other, bringing in the varieties of compassion, judgment, sense of humor, and narrative desire represented in a group of readers increases our level of literacy by expanding a single reading

experience into a broader understanding of how stories are read and interpreted through a variety of perspectives and tastes. Through the characters and circumstances in the stories we read we examine vicariously our human flaws and potential for compassion and redemption, and sometimes we can sit around and laugh at a wonderfully funny look at the stumbling and fumbling and bumbling we do in this life.

If your book club has included one of my books in its selections, thank you! I'm thrilled! I'm happy to conduct a telephone discussion with your book club, if you like, as my schedule permits. To explore this possibility, begin by clicking here to email an inquiry.

Free Press and I hope you enjoy the novel and the material we've included in the back of the trade paperback edition, including a list of suggested discussion questions to get things going, an interview, and an author profile from the Nashville Scene written by Maria Browning, published around the time Sufficient Grace debuted in hardcover.