SewaneeLetters.com

Check out the “Best Southern Books of All Time” feature in the current Oxford American magazine, for which both Michael Griffith and John Grammer were judges, and see if you agree.

And if you can get your hands on a copy of the magazine, John also recommends:

I think most of us will be able to recognize ourselves in Diane Roberts’ piece on writing and procrastination, entitled “Notwriting.” See also the poem “Itinerant” by our Sewanee neighbor Caki Wilkinson. A rich issue throughout, really.

Up close and personal with Wayne Newton? Not exactly. Check out this lovely new essay by Ellen Slezak, posted on AGNI online.

I found (Fiction professor) Michael Griffith in my mailbox today. His piece Beautiful, Desirable, and Dead: Is Eudora Welty Weirder Than You Think? is in the latest issue of the Oxford American. It’s not online, so you’ll have to go find a copy. Griffith’s punchy reading picks away Welty’s reputation as the “hydrangea-blue” Southern Lady of fiction to locate the acerbic punk of her early and less-anthologized stories.

…let it be this one by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Because it was hatched at Sewanee, somewhere between Sterling’s and Gailor. My nonfiction classmates will recognize the intro from our brainstorming session.  Sullivan makes the case for MJ as a writer above all– which made me relate to the King of Pop in weird new way. What artist has “never known a reality that wasn’t susceptible on some level to his creative powers”?

Kirsten Skrinde’s story “Clown Alley” has been published in the Southeast Review and is now posted online. This is a proud day for the SofL. We are celebrating with you Kirsten!

Huge congratulations are due to Mary Ann O’Gorman on several recent publications! In addition to organizing our yoga class, she has been busy submitting her work…

You can find her short story, Descant, in the Spring 2009 issue of The Coe Review and her poem Separation, will be published in an upcoming issue of The Bellingham Review. Check out Life in This House, from Finishing Line Press. Go Mary Ann!

So there’s a good reason for the cosmic musical pairing going down this week in Bryant Park, NYC: to commemorate the publication of this anthology! Peter Terzian’s collection Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives features essays by both John Jeremiah Sullivan and James Wood.

John Grammer just sent a link to (nonfiction professor) John Jeremiah Sullivan’s latest piece in GQ…

which achieves what I’d have thought impossible: a thoughtful, funny, sympathetic, even poignant profile of Levi Johnston, the rejected unwed hockey-playing bear-hunting father of Sarah Palin’s grandchild.

Lindsey Harding reports that a story she wrote and edited for workshop two summers ago was just accepted for publication to the online literary magazine Wanderings. The story is called “Morning Routine” and you can read it here. Congratulations Lindsey!

Eric Sundquist’s book “King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech” appeared in January. Students from last summer will recall that Professor Sundquist read part of the manuscript of the book when he visited Sewanee. The School and its students are thanked in the “Acknowledgments” of the book.