Dispatch 7: Chris Cander and The Weight of a Piano go from Mississippi to Tennessee

February 6, 2019, by

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel The Weight of a Piano (published by Knopf), continues with Dispatch 7 from Mississippi to Tennessee. 

Friday, February 1, 2019

My new friend and sales rep Jess Pearson and I made a pilgrimage to William Faulkner’s grave before starting our road trip from Oxford, Mississippi to Nashville via the peaceful, historical Natchez Trace Parkway. It was a long drive, so we stopped in Collinwood for a cup of coffee and some sugar-free fudge, and then at my editor Gary’s house in Franklin, where I got to see The Weight of a Piano lined up alphabetically next to Peter Carey and Raymond Carver and others on the wall of shelves containing all the books he’s ever edited. Swoon. Continue reading

Lauren Groff & Ann Patchett charm audiences at Inprint reading

October 21, 2016, by

RM3_3546Last Monday night, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series brought award-winning writers Lauren Groff and Ann Patchett to the Alley Theatre. Trying to find a seat in the sold-out crowd, I ran into a friend from my graduate program. We fell into a sudden and deep discussion about marriage, and what it means when only one rather than both members of a couple are able to pursue the career of their choice. How can you decide whose vocation will shape a family’s life?

RM3_3593Both of the featured novels that night, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff and Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, concern the consequences of marriage, either maintained or dissolved, and the discussion that followed revealed the depth with which both writers have entertained questions similar to our own.

Groff introduced her reading by describing the composition of Fates and Furies, which examines a marriage from husband Lotto’s perspective before we hear from his wife Mathilde. As moments and phrases leapt to mind, Groff says she darted from her desk to record them on butcher paper hung from the wall, one for each character. Her startling language and sharp sense of the absurd was a perfect complement to Ann Patchett’s reading, which featured a large cast of Benadryl-tripping, gin-stealing, gun-toting kids whose families have been recombined by their parents’ changed relationships. In her selected passage, they mistake their longing to spend summer at a nearby lake as the source of their dislocation and sorrow. Continue reading