Wednesday night I’m in charge of barbecue chicken at my in-laws, the Cochenour’s (coke-n-hour) in McKeesport, Elizabeth Township, Pennsylvania; twelve miles down the Monongahela River from downtown Pittsburgh.
Since we’re hitting the road from Chatham County, N.C. at 8am on Wednesday I made the sauce yesterday.  It’s called Tidmore’s, a traditional recipe from Galax, VA, [...]

Click here for my new blog entry on the Jazz Loft Project page concerning Eugene Smith, Thomas Wolfe, and John Coltrane.

Click here for my new blog entry on the Jazz Loft Project site concerning the writer Whitney Balliett.
Balliett was one of the all-time great serial writers.  How many MFA graduates would become great if they had regular serial outlets with hundreds of thousands of readers?   We’ll never know, at least not for now.  There’s [...]

My planned trip to Japan and the Pacific has been postponed from this coming October to March 2011.  It turns out that civilian access to Iwo Jima is allowed only once a year.  The island is uninhabited except for a military base.  Tour groups of historians, veterans, or families of veterans are allowed one day [...]

Since this site is new, I”ll take some time over the next several weeks to elaborate on a few features.  In the gallery section there is a photograph (below) of the Pamlico River made by my older brother, Dr. Hale Stephenson, from my family’s pier circa 1976 when he was a teen.  His camera looks [...]

Picture Paradise
In May I visited W. Eugene Smith’s hometown of Wichita, Kansas.  You can read a blog entry I wrote about the visit on the Jazz Loft Project website.  I was invited out there by the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University.  In some ways the trip and this personal website mark [...]