Too Close To Call

This is a chapter from my first novel, Too Close to Call, published in 2001 by the University Press of Mississippi. The link will take you to the Virginia Quarterly Review website; this chapter was published in VQR as a short story, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." [Click HERE to read.]



 

"Robert Olen Butler"

Robert Olen Butler won the Pultizer Prize for fiction in 1993, for his book of short stories, Good Scent from a Strange Mountain . A little more than a year later, I interviewed him in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and wrote this profile for Poets & Writers Magazine. It appeared in the January/February issue in 1995, in exactly this form. [Click HERE to read.]

Signature

I wrote these three pieces for Kentucky Educational Television's Signature series, which, in separate one-hour episodes, profiled three Appalachian writers: novelist and short story writer Lee Smith; playwright and director George C. Wolfe; and novelist, short story writer and essayist Barbara Kingsolver. It was used as a study guide in Kentucky high schools and colleges. [Click HERE to read.]

Review of Hunter S. Thompson's Proud Highway

This review of Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman was picked up and run by a number of US newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, the Charlotte Observer, and the San Jose Mercury News. [Click HERE to read.]

"Fire Up The Color-Tinis"

I wrote this piece for ACE Weekly as Tom Snyder's on-again-off- again 22 year run on--and love affair with--late night TV drew to an agonizing close.
[Click HERE to read.]

Kentucky Music Hall of Fame

These are timelines, explanatory text for exhibits, and voiceovers for the museum, as well as biographies for the Hall of Fame inductees. The Museum and Hall of Fame is located in Renfro Valley, Kentucky.
[Click HERE to view.]

Hardwood Heaven

Hardwood Heaven is principally a picture book with text, which grew out of a two and a half year project, Great Balls of Fire, a Kentucky Educational Television documentary on the history of basketball in Kentucky. I was the principal writer, and the Sporting News's Dave Kindred provided an introduction. The link provided here will take you to Amazon, where you can browse the book. [Click HERE to read.]
 

"Juiced"

I wrote this piece for ACE Weekly. It describes my outrage and astonishment at everything I saw on television in the hours leading up to OJ Simpson's acquittal, following his trial for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, "a human being," as court documents had it. [Click HERE to read.]