BOOKPATHS

Fayetteville, Arkansas

Novelist Ellen Gilchrist writes about Fayetteville, Arkansas, “this small town that I love,” in the November issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

“Fayetteville now has 62,000 people, but it still seems like the much smaller place I found when I was 40 years old and adopted as my home. I had driven up into the northwest Arkansas hills to spend a semester in the writing program at the University of Arkansas, where I now teach. The moment I left the flatlands and began to climb into the Ozark Mountains, I fell in love with the place. There is a welcoming naturalness to the land, and it is reflected in the people. I immediately felt at home in Fayetteville and I still feel that way. Even when I didn't know everyone in town, I felt like I knew them.” – from “My Kind of Town,” by Ellen Gilchrist, Smithsonian Magazine

Today's Bookpath

Hot Springs, Arkansas

The Bookmaker’s Daughter : a Memory Unbound, by Shirley Abbott (Fayetteville, Arkansas : University of Arkansas, reprint 2006)

Shirley Abbott recalls her complicated relationship with her father, Alfred Bemont Abbott, fondly known as “Hat,” during her childhood in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the 1940s and 1950s. Her memories reveal a father who gambled, but also one who spent evenings reading to her, “opening the door to a world of language and literature.”

“The dream that has inhabited my sleep for a lifetime comes in the shape of a house, the one where I was born. An odd house, a Southern house, with outsized, old-fashioned, double-sashed windows and two front doors that open to me as I sleep. I wander its cool rooms, part the fluttering organdy curtains…and look out toward the side yard. The address was 122 Alamo Street, a conjurer’s formula, the one unforgettable fact of my life in a forest of forgotten addresses and phone numbers and bedroom wallpapers, the address I’ll give at age ninety when they ask my name and lead me off to some other home.” – from The Bookmaker’s Daughter : a Memory Unbound, by Shirley Abbottt

Publisher’s Website

Fayetteville, Arkansas

The American Booksellers Association profiles Nightbird Books, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, this week.

“Lisa Sharp, the owner of Nightbird Books, which opened in April in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town of more than 65,000, has been pleasantly surprised by the lengths that people have gone to show their support for her new bookstore.” – ABA Website

Nightbird Books Website