 |
 |
Knoxville Bound
A Collection of Literary Works Inspired by Knoxville, Tennessee
It was just a little more than a year ago that several downtown literates heard a story on NPR about a new book made up entirely of stories specifically and vividly set in the city of New Orleans. They heard the story and had an identical thought.
Knoxville’s much smaller than New Orleans, not as infamous, and not quite as old. But the thought that descended on several Knoxville minds at once was: We can do that.
Every city has its municipal scribes, but Knoxville seems to have more than its fair share: novelists James Agee, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Marius, and David Madden, and poet Nikki Giovanni are all names recognizable to scholars and editors and booksellers across the nation. All are writers who, at one time or another, felt compelled to write down a few words about their peculiar hometown.
In addition to those are 19th-century precedents like George Washington Harris and Frances Hodgson Burnett. And there are dozens of Knoxvillians today who, for reasons of their own that aren’t always easy to share, make their homes in this city, and find subjects to write about. You don’t have to wander far here to find subjects: High ones and low ones, lovely things and venal things. Knoxville, it turns out, is an Ark of experiences of all species, cheek to jowl in this city that has a higher-than-average percentage of scholars with graduate degrees, and also a higher-than-average percentage of high-school dropouts.
Knoxville, “this obscure and prismatic city,” as Cormac McCarthy called it, is different from every angle. To some contributors in this book, Knoxville’s the dangerous big city, a bewildering Gomorrah of panhandlers, drug dealers, cross-dressers. To others, it’s a confederacy of interstate exits and chain stores, or a slow-paced place to encounter quaint country folk. Depending on what you’re familiar with, whatever it is, Knoxville is a portal to the other thing. Knoxville makes people think, and also has an alarming tendency to make them write.
So we’ve got writers, sure enough. Most, having heard of another Southern city’s anthology, would have agreed, We can do that, and then done nothing. Judy Loest, a downtown resident and cultural agitator who has won national awards for her poetry, pushed it forward. With what struck some as a naive idea, she assembled a motley committee of local writers and oddballs together, including farmer/editor Jack Rentfro who ended up doing much of the editing for the book.
Together, as unlikely as it may have seemed to some of us skeptics, they assembled an elegant book called Knoxville Bound, a thick paperback anthology of surprising breadth. More than any Knoxville anthology to date, it attempts to wrap its literary arms around a city. It includes some old friends, like the definitive Knoxville vignette, James Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer 1915”; Nikki Giovanni’s autobiographical essay, “400 Mulvaney Street”; and an early David Madden story, a Cherokee Boulevard motorcycle-and-girl fantasy, “A Piece Of the Sky.” In there are promising novels in progress by Professor Allen Wier and newspaper columnist Don Williams. It includes an essay by renegade professor-novelist Richard Marius on McCarthy; and fiction-writer Jeanne McDonald and poet Edward Francisco on the phenomenon of Marius himself. There’s a story about a radioactive monkey loose on Gay Street during a visit from President Nixon by national award-winning short-story writer Brian Griffin.
Included in this issue are just a few of the book’s standouts, including “Fallout,” a short story of the Cold War ‘50s from a child’s point of view by former UT Writer In Residence Pamela Schoenewaldt; “Ten Thousand Cigarettes,” onetime Knoxville musician and costumier Rachel Pollock’s unsparing memoir of Knoxville’s late-20th-century bohemian demimonde; “On Broadway,” a very different memoir of a Fountain City childhood by Kentucky writer Marianne Worthington; Edward Francisco’s poetic eulogy for local academic icon Richard Marius; and verse by accomplished poets Jeff Daniel Marion and Jesse Graves, as well as Knoxville Bound editor Judy Loest.
November 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 48
© 2004 Metro Pulse
|
|
