 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 |
 Union AvenueAn Urban Journal Exploring Place, Purpose, Literature, Memory, and This Time |
Journal Entries
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March, 2001, page 3
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And, although there is some truth in what he says, there is also much to love about Knoxville, at least in my opinion, biased as it is since I am a native (well, actually, born in Virginia, but the part not far from the VA/TN state line), positive aspects which I will get into later. But back to those other folks who should know better, folks who, for criminysakes, came from other places and decided to stay for purely, do we dare say this, esthetic reasons.
I know one guy, a writer born in New Jersey, spent his early adulthood in New York City, decided in his late 30s that he wanted to live South and just stuck a pin in a map. Well, you can understand; he had no preconceived notions of TN, just some vague longing that had to do with the Literary South. Obviously, he found something compelling about Knoxville, enough inspiration to write and publish a collection of stories based here.
And Jack is right: Knoxville does have a literary heritage, though you won't find it hyped by the Tourism Bureau. Literature isn't a big draw here, although we do have thriving Borders and Barnes & Noble book stores. But our last independent bookstore, Davis Kidd Booksellers, folded last year; and we could barely fill the Tennessee Theater for Book and Author Night a few years back when the Junior League in league with the Friends of the Library cajoled Pat Conroy to come talk about his new book, Prince of Tides. Nevertheless, Knoxville was the birthplace of Pulitzer prize winner James Agee, of National Book Award winners Joseph Wood Krutch (1955) and Cormac McCarthy, and poet Nikki Giovanni; it has been the home of Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden) and Alex Haley (Roots). We have a group of talented and award-winning journalists writing for our alternative newspaper, MetroPulse; published authors teaching at UT (fiction writers Allen Wier and Michael Knight, poets Marilyn Kallet and Arthur Smith); a small local press, Iris Press, which has published a surprising number of fine books in the last few years; and I would certainly be remiss if I didn't plug, again, The Knoxville Writers' Guild, which has a large and active membership and has published four respectable anthologies in the last six years, not to mention a dozen or so members who have published individually.
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