My imagination makes me human
and makes me a fool;
it gives me all the world
and exiles me from it.
--Ursula K. Le Guin
The PembrokeUnion Avenue
An Urban Journal Exploring Place,
Purpose, Literature, Memory,
and This Time


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March 2001

There are plenty of us here in this seemingly unliterary city we affectionately and critically refer to as "Knoxpatch," people who love books and good writing and think we might be able to do the same given the right circumstances. To the casual observer, however, we're often invisible in a town that has been accused of selling its artistic soul to the god of football. Look closely, though, and you'll see us sometimes in coffeehouses, staking out a corner table during the off-peak hours, our pen poised over the white page like a novice swimmer on the diving board testing the measure of his desire.

If we, like the majority of wannabe writers, never reach that depth which respected publication demands, we gain satisfaction by reading and promoting the works of others, by forging a viable literary community despite the odds. You'll find us idling hours among the aisles of our two incomparable used bookstores, The Book Eddy and Edward McKay Used Books; volunteering in the underground bowels of the Lawson-McGhee Public Library, sorting donated books for the next annual used book sale; in the coffee shop at the local Barnes & Noble planning a book festival; attending monthly readings/book signings of the Knoxville Writers' Guild in the historic Laurel Theater; or merely holed up in our book-littered lofts spinning webpages out of the thin, polluted air of this unredeemed river valley. We live inside our imaginations in an imaginary city that honors its writers.

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