On this special episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be featuring a The River Whispers Her Name: A Christmas Tale, penned and performed by Jay Grelen, based on the book by the same name. Four-year-old Rebekah Freeman wanders away from her house, her mother, father and brother, Four Door, in search of an elusive Christmas package. The River Whispers Her Name chronicles Rebekah's misadventures beginning on the eve of Christmas Eve in the marshes of Alabama. As the Christmas boxes arrived in

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be featuring biographer Ben Johnson. His biography, Fierce Solitude , published by the University of Arkansas Press, remembers to tumultuous life of Arkansas Pulitzer Prize winning poet, John Gould Fletcher. Though not widely know today, Fletcher was very influential in mid-twentieth centery literary circles--one of the shock troops for free-verse imagist lyric; a fervent Agrarian and a paradox--a man filled with contradictions that have baffled

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be featuring writer Phillippe Diederich. His novel for young adults Playing For The Devil's Fire is a portrait of friendship, corruption, and playing for keeps in the small town of Izayoc, Mexico--a pueblo in a tiny valley, only a few hours west of Mexico City, where the state of Mexico meets the states of Michoacan and Guerrerro. "That's what they call me: Boli. It's short for bolillo. Since my parents own a bakery, I guess it makes sense. I don't

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be featuring writer Adam Ehrlich Sachs, whose book Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems is a series of one hundred and seventeen fictional pieces. The book chronicles the sometimes competitive and often dyspeptic relationships between fathers and sons--the imprint each leaves upon each--the idea of outrunning each other's shadow. Sachs takes a close look at beguiled fathers and the sons who attempt to negotiate their inheritances:

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be featuring writer Steve Yarbrough, who talks about his relationship with Larry McMurtry's seminal novel The Last Picture Show -- a work of literature that left a powerful impression on Yarbrough when he was growing up in the Mississippi Delta. The Ig Publishing Bookmarked series is a collection of personal narratives about books that have profoundly influenced a renowned writer’s life. In his narrative, Yarbrough writes about his own life growing up

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be talking with Dr. Ezra Cappell, Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of English at the College of Charleston about the letters his grandfather sent to his family & his fiancé, Isa, from Fort Breendonk prison camp in Brussels. "Letters from Breendonk" helps to complete the picture— filling in the fissures and gaps in the story of the thousands of Jewish victims of Fort Breendonk. “During World War II, my grandfather, Charles Cappell, was

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we talk with Arkansas Delta novelist and Ph.D student Sanderia Faye , whose novel Mourner's Bench published by The University of Arkansas Press in 2015, recounts the experiences of Sarah Jones from the summer of 1964 to the fall of 1965. Sarah is an eight year old who has to “navigate the growing tensions of the fictional small town of Maeby, Arkansas.” The early 1960's in Arkansas are seen through Sarah and her best friend, Malika’s eyes. They become

On this episode of Arts & Letters, we talk with Nashville-based YA author Jeff Zentner . His book, The Serpent King , is filled with big hearted characters, misfits and miscreants cornered by the crushing weight of destiny, “the ossifying conviction that they are living out some ancient and preordained plan—encoded in blood, built into the architecture of name.” “Nothing stops when we’re gone,” Zentner writes. “The seasons don’t stop. This river doesn’t stop. The lives of the people we love

Listen to the Episode On this episode of Arts & Letters, we’ll be featuring a short story entitled "Preferred Signals, 1985" from Arkansas writer Woody Skinner's short story collection: A Thousand Distant Radios, published by Atelier 26 Books . "We lived in a place where cable didn’t exist. Our water was pumped from a well, our electricity streaming in on a TVA river wave. We lived in Izard County, Arkansas, where dirt roads ribboned through hills, where people were all but waiting on a

On this episode Arts & Letters, we journey into the world of dreams and psychoanalysis with professor Elissa Marder. An expert in Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams , Marder serves as Chair of the Department of French and Italian and Interim Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Emory University. “…the dream, which separates things and breaks them down, creates the new.” Charles Baudelaire Along the way Professor Marder discusses how dreams, in Freud's words, are the “royal