The unnamed narrator in the Preface of Open Country inherits a Quaker Wedding certificate. Here it is in our house on the wall of the living room proving the novel must be fact not fiction.
Ruminations
Lily Judge Van Lew
This mansion on Church Hill in Richmond belongs to Lily Judge. During the late Civil War she rented out one of her rooms to the Confederate representative from Kentucky Emmett Ellis and his wife, Faye. Faye was a dear friend of Lily from their school days at Quaker seminary in Philadelphia. The room that Emmett… Read More »
Interview of Jeff Richards
Open Country is your first novel and yet you have been writing, teaching writing, and publishing your short stories, essays, and cowboy poetry in literary journals for decades. What inspired this novel and why did you wait to tell it? Richards: I never intended to write a novel. I intended to write a short story about one… Read More »
Happy Birthday Connie Blues
Connie’s birthday is April 7, but I didn’t think about a video until now.
Tear Down This Wall
I went to an open-mike night at a comedy club in Adams Morgan in the early eighties and one act caught my attention, a man in jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with the Presidential seal, holding a Ronald Reagan dummy on his knee. It was a raunchy act in which the comedian would say something… Read More »
Interview of Jimmy Thackery
Here is an interview I did of Jimmy Thackery , blues guitarist and song writer virtuoso, for the “washington review” in the early nineties. He and Sally have since moved away from Eureka Springs to foreign climes, but he still tours the U.S.A. in the summer. His next tour starts March 21. Check out his… Read More »