Writers reflect on Charles Portis

He was the real thing, but he was modest about it. An awestruck fan meeting him by chance in a Little Rock bar named the Faded Rose gushed at him, praising him as a great American writer. Portis shrugged saying, “I’m not even the best writer in this bar.”

Travels with Robert Palmer: photographs from the Delta. 

What became clear as we began our journey together, searching for the roots of the blues, was that the music is part of the Delta landscape and the people we encountered were carrying on an important tradition that spanned many decades. My goal was to visually depict their lives and their love of the musical tradition in which they lived.

I was five years old in 1957, when Daisy was at the center of the Arkansas civil rights struggle.

For so many years I thought of myself as a Kentucky poet, and for many years, I proudly wrote about Kentucky, or at least my small, cave-hollowed corner of it. 

For the past 45 years, the Great Passion Play has been performed at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in a 4,000-seat concrete amphitheater poured along the eastern grade of Magnetic Mountain.

All the main characters in “literature” were from London and New York and St. Petersburg, but the book with the character from Little Rock was the funniest book you’d ever read, including your previous funniest book, Lucky Jim. And because Little Rock is little, your parents lived in the same apartment complex as this writer, and so you had his address.

“Of Thorns,” “Trundle,” “Liquid Assets,” “The Hill Itself”

. . . in that shabby closeness, that’s where whatever it is that saves me is,
where, praise to be something, it waits in briars like Jesus or literature.

Short fiction from our Summer issue.

Their leaving was a song. It was a bright morning star, a dawn unlike other dawns. They’d decided to go, months ago, and now there was no turning back. Truth is, there’d been no other option.

When CeDell Davis was a boy, his mother told him he would go to hell if he kept on playing the guitar and messing around with the devil’s music. Davis was born in the Delta town of Helena in 1926, and there was no shortage of devilment. A bustling cotton port on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, Helena was like a Chicago or Memphis in miniature, home to scores of white saloons and black juke joints where bootleggers, gamblers, and hustlers gathered. It was violent and wild and music was everywhere, from the clubs downtown to the street corners by the docks. “Back then, Helena was wide open,” Davis told me. “If you had the money, you could get whatever you want.” 

From the summer fiction issue.

At half past ten the guy from the corner mart came into the shelter. Naomi had only seen him a few times, but he had a distinctive look, to say the least. He was young but rugged, with short-cropped hair and broad shoulders. It figured that the most attractive man in town her age was also a triple amputee.