Chapter 16

1 week ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Hear the name William Faulkner and you think of his work. Short stories like “Barn Burning” or long ones like “The Bear,” such novels as The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! The tangled prose, those thorny truths. And his greatest creation, a small world as real to us as the dirt under our feet, the mythical Yoknapatawpha County. Yet the work wasn’t enough. It never is. When we’re fascinated by the art, we must find out all we can of the artist.

1 week ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

I told a friend about an argument we had in the library while designing some bookmarks. One staff member kept wanting to add information. “We have more information than bookmark,” a frustrated colleague said. “Then make the bookmark bigger,” snapped the annoyed staff member. My friend was more puzzled than amused as I described a proposed bookmark larger than any book. “Who uses bookmarks anymore?” she asked.

2 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

“Tennessee” is derived from the Cherokee noun Ta-Nas-Ce, “river with a big bend,” which could allude to scores of streams and meanders in the state’s watershed but likely refers to a bend and village along the Little Tennessee River in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.

2 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

A mother and father find themselves at odds over how to handle their troubled adult son, a relapsed alcoholic they believe may have killed someone during a blackout. A history professor nearing retirement recalls his childhood religiousness and his break with the Catholic Church before visiting an old friend with a terrible secret. A woman shelters at home with her husband during Covid while fearing for the life of the lover separated from her by the pandemic.

2 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

One of the saddest times of my life was the month Tummywumps, my ginger tabby, went missing. I’d left a window open overnight, and while I dozed, she sliced a hole in the screen and stole away like a jewel thief. She was gone … and I was heartbroken. Tummywumps had always seemed happy, or at least indifferent. Like abstract art, the emotional state of a cat is subject to interpretation. Whatever my pet felt about our relationship, she left me that night.