Blog
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First Three Years in Texas
Earlier this year I wrote an essay for Texas Highways magazine about my family’s first three years living in Texas. The piece includes some biographical and personal material that I’ve not written about before, including a recipe for a classic fish stew from my stomping grounds in coastal North Carolina, a place where we will…
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The Documentary Writing of Whitney Balliett
In the fall of 2010 I wrote the following piece for the blog on The Jazz Loft Project website, which went offline a few years later during transition at the hosting institution, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, where I was based for fifteen years. This morning I had occasion to revisit this…
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Ghost Writing for Lucinda Williams
My copies of Lucinda Williams‘ new memoir arrived at our house in College Station, TX two days ago. I was the ghost writer for her book. I’m pleased with how it turned out, and grateful to have been involved. Lucinda’s acknowledgments, clipped below, describe well how we originally met and our book process. Almost four…
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Taming the Tiger: A Conversation with Nicole Rudick
I’ve written here before about my invaluabe, longterm collaborative work with writer and editor, Nicole Rudick. Today I’m honored and thrilled and grateful to have an interview I conducted with Nicole about her brilliant, unusual new book on the life and work of artist Niki de Saint Phalle published by Air/Light magazine out of the…
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“Is This Home?” Selected by Brittany Howard
In the Winter 2020-21 issue of Oxford American magazine, the great musician, Brittany Howard (check out her 2019 album Jaime which sounds like something only Lauryn Hill, Prince or D’Angelo would or could do), has chosen my 2007 piece on Thelonious Monk’s 1970 return to his birthplace of North Carolina, “Is this Home?,” as one…
