Reviewer Jayne Moore Waldrop calls The Man Who Loved Birds “compelling . . . lush . . . unforgettable.” Read the full review here:Review | 'Man Who Loved Birds' set in Ky. KnobsJayne Moore Waldrop, Louisville Courier-Journal, March 17, 2016...
In an unprecedented commitment to a native Kentuckian, the University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is issuing three novels by Fenton Johnson, with all three to appear simultaneously in March 2016.The Man Who Loved Birds, his newest novel, is an ambitious work that has received warm...
Sarabande Press, one of the nation’s leading literary presses, has announced the selection of Fenton Johnson’s Notes of an Emigrant Son: New and Selected Essays as its 2017 selection in the Linda Bruckheimer Kentucky Literature Series.Sarabande will publish Notes in May 2017....
W.W. Norton announces the acquisition of Fenton’s Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude, a book-length meditation on solitaries and solitude based on his April 2015 Folio essay in Harper’s Magazine.Going It Alone will be published in January 2018....
Christmas doggerel, 2015 Father Louis is blessing the writers againPoets and prosodists, comely good men,Who quoth and who quaff in the woods where he trodTyping and tapping in service to God.Theophilus Woodchuck is burrowing deepPreparing himself for a long winter’s sleep,Before hibernating he’s making a...
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the RockRegardless of what one thinks about the therapeutic potential or lack thereof of psychedelics, the long piece by Michael Pollan in...
Writer and writing maven Cynthia Newberry Martin maintains a blog in which writers chronicle our daily lives. She asked me to write the July entry, with a prompt from Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." But when...
Some years back Sarah Cahill, now an accomplished Bay Area pianist, was writing an article for a local paper on elegant and not-so-elegant public restrooms in the Bay Area. She wandered into the Chapel of Chimes, designed in 1926 by Julia Morgan, one of the...
Here's a link to my quick look at the roots of the literature of social justice, published in the excellent online magazine Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments: http://terrain.org/2014/reviews-reads/recommended-reads-literature-social-justice/ In autumn 2014 I'll be teaching a graduate craft of literature course through the University...
About Dallas Buyers’ Club: Outside Matthew McConaughey’s performance as Ron Woodruff as alternative therapies peddler, the film was pretty thin – a response that’s not surprising from one who lived through those times. Screenwriters Melisa Wallick and Craig Borten take as their template the stock 1950s...