Author: Scott McKenzie

Interview: Andrew Vachss, Author

It’s 93 degrees, with high humidity that chokes like a punch in the throat. I sit in the car, sweating, unable to turn on the ignition, just needing to digest. Part of me wants to call every friend I know and another part of me wants to go mute, to withhold speech for days, just…

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100 Years of Assistance in Playing the Ponies

Frank Deford has an interesting piece on SI.com about the 100th anniversary of the Daily Racing Form printing the esoteric and confusing past performance statistics for horse races. Deford writes “The scales fall from your eyes when you learn to read past performances. There are various signposts in your youth which speak to growing up:…

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RIP R.L.

More sad news today… North Mississippi blues legend R.L. Burnside passed away last night. The AP reports “Burnside died Thursday morning at the St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. His health had been declining for some time, said Matthew Johnson, owner of Burnside’s record label, Fat Possum.” Burnside was a sharecropper early in his life…

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MS Bookstores Destroyed

Publishers Weekly continued their investigation into the status of bookstores in Louisiana and Mississippi and received unfortunate news yesterday. Hurricane Katrine inflicted irrevocable damage on Susan Daigre’s Bookends Bookstore in Bay St. Louis, MS. Also destroyed was Pass Christian Books in Pass Christian, MS, run by Scott Naugle and Richard Daley. “Both of those stores…

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Interview: Billy Sheehan, Musician

The discussion of just getting started writing, don’t wait, don’t talk, just jump in, is a perfect segue into this week’s interview. I thought it might be interesting to talk to artists in other art forms and see how their lives, frustrations, and aspirations parallel those of authors. I’ve always been a guitar lunatic and…

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