Flowers and birds and greening trees may be the sure signs of spring in the world at large; but in the world of my profession-in the world of book publishing and book publishers-the surest sign is the “Sales Conference.” The words are always said capitalized and with all the verbal emphasis that quote marks can […]

Sam and I live on The Farm In Lucy. There are several oddities about that sentence. As a statement, however, it is true, or at least it’s factually accurate. The most immediately apparent oddity in its facts is that Lucy really is a place, a small farming community in southwestern Tennessee, just slightly north and […]

Spring always gets good press everywhere, but it does especially well in south-western Tennessee where the mighty Mississippi is not only a river, but also our state line and our climate-control system. Our summers, being definitely southern and southern hot, are more intolerable even than most because of the Big Muddy and its gift of […]

 MONDAY MORNING BLOG - May 5, 2008
Though I have always been a devotee of T. S. Eliot and though I have always appreciated the poetic truth or message in his saying of April that it is the cruelest month, I have never taken his lines literally. Or I had not until last Wednesday when, on […]