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For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most impor­tant writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative pro­cesses. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and Pat Toomay have collected and transcribed some of the iconic interactions from the show.

Featuring interviews with:
Arna Bontemps • Marshall Chapman • Pat Conroy • Rodney Crowell • John Egerton • Jesse Hill Ford • Charles Fountain • William Price Fox • Kinky Friedman • Frye Gaillard • Nikki Giovanni • Doris Kearns Goodwin • David Halberstam • Waylon Jennings • John Lewis • David Maraniss • William Marshall • Jon Meacham • Ann Patchett • Alice Randall • Dori Sanders • John Seigenthaler Sr. • Marty Stuart • Pat Toomay

This edited collection explores an important development in the teaching of writing over the last half century: the rise of creative nonfiction, a vast terrain of genres from memoir and personal essays to nature and travel writing to literary journalism, works grounded in true experiences but inflected by a creative sensibility. Celebrating the influence of Richard Lloyd-Jones—long-time chair of the English Department at the University of Iowa, president of NCTE, chair of CCCC, and the winner of CCCC’s first Exemplar Award—the essays in this collection reveal a person whose efforts, largely behind the scenes, were instrumental in the growth of creative nonfiction. Variously historical and reflective, philosophical and political, the essays offer an expansive vision for teaching writing, one shaped by teachers’ experiences as writers themselves, and all embodying in style and voice a focus on the full arts of written language.