If you need something to do this week head on up to Columbus, MS for the 25th Annual Welty Festival at Mississippi University for Women. Featured writers include China Grove alumni, Ellen Gilchrist, Michael Farris Smith, and Kendall Dunkelberg. Luke and I will both be up there, so come by and say, “Hi.” China Grove […]

Went down to see and interview Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump about his new book The Aviatiors and on all sorts of writerly, historic, and social subjects. In the next issue of China Grove. A great interview on tape, now all I have to do is write it. Updates to follow!

An old friend died yesterday, Cornelia Graves Spain, and I have known her since the 10th grade. She has lived a life of grace and has been a voice of support for the town of Luray, Virginia and the region of the Shenandoah Valley her whole life long. She joined in an experimental piece of […]

what do you think?

Great conference in Oxford over the weekend Neil White did a great job and is a great guy. Lots of good contacts and hope to receive some interesting submissions to pass on to our readers in coming issues. I felt that since there is the Gilchrist Prize for Short Fiction and the China Grove Prize […]

Anyone with ties to New Orleans knows their Confederacy of Dunces, and it’s Swiftian derivation. This new biography of John Kennedy Toole has me retreading it. Looking at the story as a manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia, reframes everything entirely, and refocuses our considerations of the causes of Toole’s suicide. Worth plowing through the first chapter, […]

Here is a little intro piece I put together.  It is made up of images Luke and I captured while we were walking around the China Grove area.  It was November but still in the mid 70’s.  Most of this was filmed at the China Grove Methodist Church, as there isn’t a whole lot of […]

Luke and I drove down to Ocean Springs and spent the day with Ellen Gilchrist, I have no idea how we can possibly compress it, watched it with Charlene Moore Anderson last night and she was absolutely enthralled. Time to get to work. Oh, by the way, China Grove will be awarding the first Ellen […]