How often have you heard that we lived in simpler times? When people my age say it, they’re often forgetting the Cold War, the culture war,...

In high school, my very favorite person was named Paige.  She had joined our tight-knit little class pretty late along the way but fit in re...

I've been thinking of writing a Christmas story.  When I was little, this really remarkable woman gathered artistically leaning people a...

In the years since I realized she was being silly, maybe even neurotic.  It had me plenty worried at the time, though.  In the summer betwee...

I was still very young when we moved from Northside Drive to Honeysuckle Lane.  My sister only lived in the old house a few months before we...

 Stage and dance floor, Lamar Theater/Disco, Downtown Jackson, 1979

 In 1978 I was fifteen years old.  It was the first year I ever fully experienced the darkness inside me.  My family fought through an extra...

Because I'm old, I take a diuretic to make sure my body doesn't retain water because my body works about as well as a 1982 Ford.  It...

I became a bully.  I didn’t mean to.  I didn’t want to.  I think it happened because I didn’t do enough to make sure it didn’t happen.  I le...

I always felt like being an introvert like I am was such a disappointment to everybody, particularly my mother.  She tried so hard to get me...

 For guys in my dad’s generation, for those who were also from here, there wasn’t much more impressive than an airplane.  Some, like his cou...

 When I was very little, I was always the first one awake, the first one out of bed and out of my room.  I got to turn the coffee pot on and...

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook by Charles W. Eagles I've just been made aware of this book, but I...

 I was probably ten years old when I fully understood that it was my Uncle Tom who made the newspaper.  I was probably twenty years old befo...

This is a story about memory, and family, and art.  This is a story about Mississippi and happiness and a story about love. Yesterday my sis...

Technically, my first theater was the Lamar downtown because they had Disney movies.  The very first movie I can remember seeing was Toby Ty...