No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious. ~ Henry Brooks Adams
H.L. Mencken hated the South. My first meaningful encounters with Mencken's work came while we were in Dayton. Mencken approached his coverage of the Scopes Trial — and Dayton and its people — with the same quick-witted ferocity he was famous for. In reading over his attacks of the South in Ralph C. Wood's Flannery O'Connor and … Continue reading Do We Remember: ‘We Have Had Our Fall’
I don't know if he meant to, but my friend Matthew Lee Anderson, in the same kind of way you hear on the local nightly news, just said in an ultrasmooth voice, "Now over to you, Michael." In his ever-so-insightful way, Matt called attention to a series of pieces from his Mere Orthodoxy collaborator Jake Meador … Continue reading A Small Town Writer’s Challenge
The news is public now: in three weeks Julie, Jesse, Miles, and I will be headed back to Tennessee. I've accepted a job with The Greeneville Sun, a daily newspaper in northeast Tennessee, not too far from the Tri-Cities. I'll become the paper's assistant managing editor. We've been telling our friends here in Colorado. Though no … Continue reading Why Go Back to Community Journalism?
Michael Reneau 