MetroPulse Stories: Guest Speaker

Q&A: Food Writer Francis Lam

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:27:00 -0000

In this era where everyone who Instagrams his lunch and posts it on Tumblr fancies himself a food writer, Francis Lam is the real deal.

Q&A: Designer Paulie Gibson, Appearing at Knoxville Fashion Week

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:14:00 -0000

Paulie Gibson is an up-and-coming St. Louis based designer of think-out-of-the-box men’s fashion. His work will be featured during Knoxville Fashion Week.

Q&A: Former Teen Heartthrob and Evangelical Speaker Kirk Cameron

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:57:00 -0000

There was a time—before Justin Bieber, before Zac Efron, before even the New Kids on the Block—where one teen heartthrob towered o'er all the rest, ruling the hearts of prepubescent girls with a twinkle in his eye and a winsome smile. That boy was Kirk Cameron, aka Mike Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains, which had 20 million weekly viewers at the peak of it popularity in the late 1980s.

Q&A: Jamie Satterfield, Investigative Reporter

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:17:00 -0000

Print reporters don’t usually have the cult of personality surrounding them that television reporters do. No one knows what we look like, for one, and most readers don’t even bother to pay attention to bylines. Jamie Satterfield, however, is not like most newspaper reporters.

Q&A: The Lee Bros., Authors of 'The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen'

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:41:00 -0000

Matt and Ted Lee are almost accidental food celebrities. A winter craving for boiled peanuts in New York City in the 1990s turned into a mail-order company, which turned into a lot of travel-writing assignments, which has turned into three well-regarded Southern cookbooks.

Q&A: Cartoonist Gene Yang

everettm@metropulse.com (Matthew Everett) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:43:00 -0000

Gene Yang, who has been writing and drawing comics since the mid-1990s, is best known for the 2006 graphic novel American Born Chinese, about a first-generation Chinese-American teenager and his difficulty coming to terms with junior high school. American Born Chinese won an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Novel and was nominated for a National Book Award. Yang also teaches computer science in Oakland, Calif., where he uses comics in the classroom. He’ll be making two public appearances in Knoxville next week.

Q&A: Essayist and Undertaker Thomas Lynch

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:59:00 -0000

Thomas Lynch is a poet, an essayist, a memoirist, and a fiction writer. He is also a funeral director.

Q&A: Fox News Commentator Greg Gutfeld

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:59:00 -0000

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s coming to town to promote his new book, The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph Over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage, which claims that the left pretends to be tolerant but isn’t—at least when it comes to conservatives. It’s no surprise that a Fox News host finds his own network “fair and balanced” while most other media outlets are far from it.

Q&A: Novelist Adam Johnson

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:23:00 -0000

Johnson is a professor at Stanford whose previous works—the short-story collection Emporium and the 2003 novel Parasites Like Us—have tended toward the fantastic. His new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, is no less fantastic, all the more so for its grounding in the surreal closed-off culture of North Korea.

Q&A: Climber and Activist Alan Arnette

everettm@metropulse.com (Matthew Everett) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 20:14:00 -0000

Not long after Alan Arnette started climbing mountains, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. After she died, in 2009, the technology executive set out on his most ambitious climbing adventure, and hooked it to a campaign to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s.

Q&A: Author Bobbie Ann Mason

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:05:00 -0000

Bobbie Ann Mason may still live in Kentucky, but she doesn’t like to think of herself as a Southern writer anymore. Her earliest, award-winning works—the collection Shiloh and Other Stories and the novel In Country—were set in Western Kentucky, where Mason grew up, but she says she’s moved beyond that now.

Q&A: Lenoir City teacher James Yoakley

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:02:00 -0000

It was not a good spring for James Yoakley. The Lenoir City High School English teacher first found himself embroiled in controversy in February, when the school’s administration rejected a column written by the student newspaper editor, Krystal Myers, titled “No Rights: The Life of an Atheist.” Then in May, Yoakley was in the thick of things again—this time for his role as faculty advisor to the yearbook, which ran an interview with an openly gay student. Now it’s a new school year, and Yoakley has a new job.

Q&A: Jane Maas, the Real-Life Peggy Olson

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:51:00 -0000

Jane Maas has been called the real-life Peggy Olson, although for that statement to be entirely true, Peggy will have to end up as president of a major advertising agency by the end of her career. Like Olson, Maas started as a copywriter; she rose through the ranks at the famed Madison Avenue firm Ogilvy & Mather to become creative director and agency officer, finally leaving in the '70s to become vice-president at another agency, then president of a third in the '80s. Mass has published several books about advertising over the years, but it's her new memoir, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond, that's been generating all kinds of recent buzz.

Q&A: Novelist Bryan Charles

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:12:00 -0000

Bryan Charles is relatively new to Knoxville, but he’s not new to writing. His first novel, Grab on to Me Tightly as If I Knew the Way, came out in 2006, and his monograph on Pavement’s album Wowee Zowee for the 33 1/3 series, which the Portland Mercury called “one of the best pieces of rock journalism in recent memory,” was released in early 2010. Later that year, Open City put out Charles’ memoir, There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From, an unsentimental account of trying to make it as a writer in New York at the turn of the century.

Grassroots Documentary Project 'One Day on Earth' Makes its Way to Knoxville

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:20:00 -0000

On Oct. 10, 2010, thousands of people from every country on Earth picked up their video cameras and participated in what organizers hope to be a continuing event in global culture. That footage has now been compiled into the feature film One Day on Earth, which is screening in locations all over the world on Sunday, April 22.

Q&A: Performance Artist Christian Cox

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:58:00 -0000

Christian Cox is a Knoxville-based artist and designer who has recently branched out into performance. His first set this year found a roomful of eager Royal Bangs fans running the anti-comedy gauntlet of hack standup “Garry Plimpton,” to the bemusement of some and the outsized rage of many more.

Q&A: Ultrahiker Andrew Skurka

everettm@metropulse.com (Matthew Everett) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:08:00 -0000

Andrew Skurka has logged 30,000 miles of long-distance hiking and has refined walking in the woods to a science. Now he has distilled his hard-earned outdoor skills and insight into the recently published book The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide (National Geographic).

Q&A: Comedian Steven Wright

everettm@metropulse.com (Matthew Everett) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:21:00 -0000

Steven Wright first rose to prominence in the 1980s as a kind of anti-comedian; his deadpan style, unruly haircut, and absurdist observational one-liners were completely unlike any other comedy at the time. Wright has only released two albums during his career—I Have a Pony in 1985 and I Still Have a Pony in 2007—but regular appearances on late-night television, a string of cable TV specials, a voice role in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and consistent touring have kept him in the public eye.

Q&A: Christopher Hebert, author of 'The Boiling Season'

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:59:00 -0000

Christopher Hebert may be best known around Knoxville as a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, but all of that is about to change with the publication of his first book, The Boiling Season (Harper).

Q&A: Novelist Josh Weil

gervinc@metropulse.com (Cari Wade Gervin) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:12:00 -0000

Weil’s protagonists are really alone—so alone it hurts. Touches of a modern Southern Gothic pop up now and again, which is probably why Weil has been compared to Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. But his novellas aren’t about violence, they’re about striving for connection, even if it’s only with a cow.