South's enduring past intrigues teacher By NELL LITTER FOCUS Staff Writer  Clarion Ledger June 15, 1983 Steve Anspach is a Northerner ch...

Sometimes, I lose control of my stories.  Earlier today, I tried to write down how this girl once spent several minutes slapping and punchin...

 Tomorrow's story for the Eudora Welty reading group is "A Visit of Charity" from "A Curtain of Green."  The story i...

How many books does it take to be considered "well-read?"  I'll go to my grave, considering myself just the opposite.  Part of...

 Alan Ball is a playwright and screenwriter from Mariette, Georgia.  He's a Southern gentleman of a certain age (six years older than I ...

For quite a while now, I’ve been collecting the urban legends that emanate from students and employees at the University of Mississippi Medi...

 Ken Stribling messaged me last night with corrections about a piece I wrote at 3:00 a.m.  What would I do without friends who can’t sleep e...

This project that I’m calling “Lies My Mother Never Told Me” has been openly banging around in my head for about a year and a half now.   Qu...

If I'm going to write about what happened in the sixties and early seventies, I feel like I need to be able to at least understand and a...

Because his life wasn't as full of so many personal tragedies as his friend Lewis, Tolkien never vacillated between belief and atheism a...

Sometimes I run into people who, even if we never interacted so much before, my life and theirs intertwine like the roots of two trees in th...

It's my hope that I can show you more than I tell you in my book, but since these are imaginary people, I have to decide what to tell yo...

Since the action of my book takes place around a college production of Mid Summers Night Dream, I'm thinking of calling it "What Fo...

Mississippi never leads nor follows.  It intensifies whatever fears and prejudices are already present in the larger society as if to say, ...

For my writing workshop today, we were assigned to bring in photo prompts for some free writing.  I have a folder on my phone of a couple hu...

While I haven't actually been asked to do this, I'm constantly trying to defend my novel, at least to myself.  Why is it worth writi...

It’s been about a year since I started letting the world read my daily journals or significant parts of them.  I began writing them forty-fi...

If you visit Eudora Welty's house and museum, you can see some of her typewriters.  How a writer writes is very important, especially fo...

Greenlights  My dear friend (and former football trainer) gave me a copy of Greenlights  by Matthew McConaughey.  I met McConaughey briefly ...

Google provides webmasters with some really useful tools on how people use their website. Here's what it said about Boyd's Life for...