This interview aired in 2023.

On this month’s Open Book, my guest is Duane Betts. Like his father, Dickey, the guitar player with the Allman Brothers Band played guitar with his father Dickey Betts for several decades before forming his own band, Great Southern, Duane Betts is a gifted guitar player. He played with his father in Great Southern for a decade. He later played with the California band Dawes before forming a band with Gregg Allman’s son Devon. They have made a couple of albums together, but for the first time this year he has released an album under his own name.

On this episode of WUTC's "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Rollo Romig, author of "I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India."

(Aired Thu 5/22/25)

On this episode of WUTC's "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Jennifer Boulanger, the author of "A Song for Olaf: A Memoir of Sibling Love at the Dawn of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic," published by Mnemosyne Books.

On this episode of WUTC's "Open Book" with Richard Winham, Paul Luikart - author, teacher and painter - talks about his latest work of short-form storytelling: "Mercy."

On this episode of "Open Book" on WUTC, Richard Winham showcases "Mileage," the one-year anniversary show by Cast Iron Storytelling - this Sunday at Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga.

On this episode of WUTC's "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Mark L. Brooks, an alum of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga whose debut novel is "Laying Autumn's Dust: A Southern Tragedy About Betrayal, Revenge, and Murder," published by Co-Pilot Publishing.

On this episode of WUTC's "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Pamela Thomas-Graham, author and photographer of the forthcoming book "When Words Fail: A Photographic Journey through New York City."

On this episode of WUTC's "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with two poets in back-to-conversations: Mia S. Willis from Charlotte, NC - and Chattanooga's own Christian J. Collier.

On this episode of "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Deanna Raybourn, author of "Kills Well with Others."

Her novel - a sequel to "Killers of a Certain Age," a New York Times best seller - offers another bloody good adventure for four female assassins who band together again as they prepare for retirement.

(Aired 12/14/24)

Jared Sullivan, an alum of UTC, talks about his book "Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe" - on the coal ash disaster in Kingston, TN in 2008 and its aftermath - on this episode of WUTC's "Open Book" with Richard Winham.

(Aired Sat 11/16/24)

Author Matthew Hubbard is Richard Winham's guest for this episode of WUTC's "Open Book."

(Aired Sat 11/09/24)

On this episode of "Open Book," Richard Winham shares the first part of his conversation with Peggy Douglas of "Southern Exposure."

(Aired Sat 10/19/24)

On this episode of "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Andrew K. Clark, Appalachian Gothic writer and poet who lives near Asheville, NC - and shares the first part of his conversation with Peggy Douglas of "Southern Exposure."

Richard Jackson - who established the creative writing program on our campus, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga - talks about his latest collection of poems, "Where the Wind Comes From," on this episode of "Open Book" with WUTC's Richard Winham.

On this episode of "Open Book," Richard Winham speaks with Michael Ake, Holly Morse-Ellington and Kashun Parks of Cast Iron Storytelling from Next Exit Productions - and author Mark Anderson.

Laura Hankin - whose latest novel and first romcom is "One-Star Romance" - is Richard Winham's guest on this episode of "Open Book."

On this Open Book, my first guest is Tasha Coryell - whose just published novel is titled "Love Letters To a Serial Killer."

In the excerpt from the opening pages of the novel, read by Andi Arndt, the young woman Hannah talks about her life - alone much of the time - in Minnesota.

It’s the preamble to her decision to write to an accused serial killer, William, in prison awaiting trial in Atlanta for the murder of four young women.

My second guest on this show is Jason Tinney.

Playwright and actor, Jason is also a short story writer.

This is a story about the first time he visited the barber shop with his dad when he was a kid.

(Aired 5/18/24)

For this "Open Book," my first guest is Stephen Eoannou.

When I was a very young lad living in a London suburb, I spent many of my days dreaming of riding a horse, six guns strapped to my waist on the dusty roads of the Old West. The Lone Ranger was my hero and I waited eagerly each week to catch up with his adventures on the 9” screen of the family television.

I wasn’t alone.

The show had an international audience in the millions - one of whom is my guest, Stephen Eoannou.

He was watching the show in Buffalo, New York, the city where the character was created by a writer called Fran Striker in the midst of the Depression in the 1930’s. For reasons Mr. Eoannou will explain, Fran Striker has never really been credited with creating the character and writing the stories that introduced him to an audience hungry for a hero in the dark hopeless days of the Depression.

My other guest on this show is singer and songwriter Pi Jacobs - who, according to her bio, draws inspiration for her sultry, bluesy songs from her unconventional upbringing in “The Land of Weed and Wine” - aka Northern California.

(Aired 5/11/24)

In this Open Book, my guest is a practicing psychiatrist who writes under the name James Champion.

He decided to use a different name when writing his first novel to protect the patients he writes about in his account of the two years he spent in medical school as a clinical resident.

“The clinical years of medical school are a unique and challenging experience,” he said - a period in which he was moving to a different rotation (including gynecology, cardiology, pediatrics psychiatry and neurosurgery) every one to two months for two years.

During that time in a small town in Kentucky, he met a motley cast of patients - including one with blue skin (the result of an overdose of oxycontin, a widely abused drug in the community) and worked with a hostile OB-GYN given to throwing tantrums almost daily.

A novel by a doctor writing under the nom de plume Samuel Shem inspired him to write about his experiences as a clinical resident. Shem’s novel, first published in the late 1970’s, is a satirical account of the life of a medical student working as a resident in a hospital. The book’s account of the often abusive working conditions was controversial at the time, but it did help improve working conditions for future medical students.

(Aired 4/13/2024)

For the first half of this week’s "Open Book," my guests are the local playwrights, actors and producers Jason Tinney and Holly Morse-Ellington.

In the second half of the show, my guest is Melodie Edwards.

Her first novel was a re-imagining of "Jane Eyre," in which she pulled Jane and her prickly love interest Edward Rochester from the mid-19th Century into the present day.

In her just published second novel, a re-imagining of Jane Austen’s "Persuasion," she’s brought Anne Elliott forward from earlier in the 19th Century into the present day in a village just north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border.

Setting these iconic novels in the modern world gives Melodie the opportunity to explore the ways in which the world has changed, but human nature and the intimate dance between men and women remains essentially unchanged.

But, the world has changed and the challenge for Melodie, as she wrote in an introduction to the novel, was finding a way to keep her protagonists Anne Elliott and Ben Wentworth inn the dance.

Richard Winham talks to Jason Tinney - actor, writer and producer - about his latest project "Cast Iron Storytelling." The series of curated stories from ordinary people was launched in April at Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga - and returns there on Saturday, June 22nd and Sunday, June 23rd.

My guests for this Open Book are Deborah Levine and Amy Wright. Deborah Levine is the editor-in-chief of the American Diversity Report. She has written 18 books and, according to her biography, she has been a change-maker for a diverse world in challenging times for more than three decades. In fact for much of her life, Deborah has been living in her imagination just as she did when she was a little girl growing up on the island of Bermuda.

For the second half of the program, my guest is Amy Wright. Dr. Wright is a professor of English at Austin Peay University in Clarksville Tennessee. Like my other guest this evening, Deborah Levine, Amy Wright uses the study of language and communication to foster understanding. Her most recent book, Paper Concert, is a distillation of more than a decade of conversations with a range of writers and thinkers including Coleman Barks, Dorothy Allison, Dinty Moore, and Rae Armantrout. She asked everyone the same questions beginning with: When in your life have you felt freest, but her central question was who am I?

For this Open Book which is now on two successive Saturday evenings every month, my guest is Rose McLarney whose most recent collection of poems, Colorfast, has just been published.

Rose is an associate professor of creative writing at Auburn University in Alabama. She’s also co-editor-in-chief and poetry editor of The Southern Humanities Review. She grew up in Western North Carolina and many of the poems in this book are reflections on her life growing up in the North Carolina mountains.

For this Open Book. my guest is New York Times, Wall Street Journal & USA Today bestselling author of historical women’s fiction, Stephanie Dray. Her award-winning work has been translated into many languages and tops lists for the most anticipated reads of the year. Her most recent book is a novel based on the life of Frances Perkins. Frances Perkins is best remembered, if at all, as one of the architects of the Social Security Act. But during the nearly two decades when she was in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet first when he was Governor of New York and then during the four terms in which he was President, she worked tirelessly for justice for the working poor.

My second guest, Ray Padgett, is passionate about Bob Dylan. He began first hosting and producing a radio show in which he played cover songs. After a while, he stopped hosting the show and in 2007 he started publishing a blog on cover songs. It’s since been featured in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Pitchfork. More recently he began publishing an email newsletter, Flagging Down The Double E, an ongoing series of essays on Bob Dylan’s ever-evolving live shows. He’s also just now published a collection of interviews with some of the many musicians who have played with Bob Dylan in the past sixty years titled Pledging My Time.

Food critic Anya Von Bremzen’s most recent book National Dish is a fascinating reflection on how essential food is to national identity, especially in an era when globalization is creating a kind of universal identity where once difficult-to-source indigenous dishes have become ubiquitous and available in almost any supermarket anywhere.

Anya grew up in the USSR with her mother who loved food and daily lamented the paucity of choice in the grocery store—a fact that wasn’t lost on the Russian premier, Boris Yeltsin. When he visited a Western supermarket for the first time in the 1980’s he is reported to have said that it was at that moment that he realized the Soviet system was doomed.

Sybil Baker is an Assistant Professor in the English department here at UTC. She’s also on the faculty of Vermont College of Fine Art’s inaugural low-residency international MFA program. She teaches classes in literature and creative writing here at UTC. Her most recent novel, just published, is titled Apparitions.

The novel is set in Cyprus. Cyprus is an island divided. In the early 1970’s the Turks invaded the island in a war with neighboring Greece. Fifty years later much of the island is Greek Cypriot, but a northern section of the island is still occupied by Turkey. The people living in the section of the island occupied by Turkey can’t cross the border into the part of the island controlled by Greece, but people living in the main part of the island can freely cross the border and often do because prices are much cheaper in what’s known as Northern Cyprus.

The novel was inspired by the semester Sybil spent as a visiting Assistant Professor at The Middle Eastern Technical University’s Northern Cyprus Campus in the Spring of 2015.

My guest on this month’s Open Book is Devereaux Chivington Stebbins. Devereaux, who writes under the pen name C.S. Devereaux, has written several memoirs, but her most recent novel is her first work of historical fiction. While It’s based on the life of a North Carolina man, Jason Hyde, and the town he helped build in the mountains of North Carolina it is equally a portrait of a period in the history of the country immediately before and after the Civil War.

Wars are necessarily disruptive, but a civil war upends everyone’s life as well as the social order. At the beginning of the novel Jason Hyde is a school teacher, married with a young family, but almost as soon as war is declared his life begins to fall apart when he loses his job and can’t pay his bills or feed his growing family. The choices he makes in the face of these challenges reflect the upheaval and devastation wrought by the war and its aftermath in the nascent union.

In the program's second half, my guest is poet and playwright, professor and storyteller Peggy Douglas. Peggy, together with her friend Anne Swedberg, has been teaching a class on writing and performing poetic monologues here at UTC. The twelve students in the class will each be performing a monologue they have written based on conversations with people from the community about their lives in the Guerry Center Reading Room on April 25th at 5 pm. Admission is free and open to the public.

This is open Book. My second guest this evening is local writer and essayist Gwen Mullins. Gwen is in the process of submitting her first novel to a publisher, while she’s also already working on her second. The new novel centers on a family coming to terms with the realization slowly growing that their son may be a psychopath. She has already written a short story about the family titled Violent Devotion. which was published in an anthology titled The Best Mystery Stories of 2022.

The poems celebrating Dolly Parton’s life and writing titled "Let Me Say This" edited by my guest Julie Bloemeke and Dustin Brookshire was published last month. This is Open Book. I’m Richard Winham. Thanks so much for listening. Good night.

Brent Bill, the owner of Red Bird Recording studio on East 13th Street in Chattanooga.

Alex Volz, a storyteller turned songwriter.

Kate Landers, a short story writer with an occasional itch for poetry.

So I think that when I did sit down to try and write, something - I really felt that something had adjusted in me. And it wasn't that I thought, oh, you know, it's going to be a new job or something or a career. I never thought anybody'd read it. I never thought anybody'd ever pay me to do it. But I just felt better somehow, which is kind of weird. I don't always feel better now, but certainly the first day I sat down, it was really, strangely liberating or something. I don't know.

Her first novel, just published, titled Trespasses has received universally enthusiastic reviews. A reviewer for The New York Times Book Review called it “brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.” In The Washington Post, a reviewer wrote, “Kennedy has written a captivating first novel that manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure.”

Robert Crais began his career writing scripts for such groundbreaking television shows as Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, and L.A Law. But after ten years in Hollywood spent writing as one of a group of writers working on a script, he left to write novels “he wanted to read” and over which he had sole control. Since the mid-1980s, he’s written nineteen novels, published in 62 countries, featuring a private detective called Elvis Cole.

In 2014, Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master. Agatha Christie was the first writer to receive the award in 1955 which was presented irregularly until 1978 and is now presented annually. Other recipients include Alfred Hitchcock, John Le Carre, and Georges Simenon. His most recent novel featuring Elvis Cole is titled Racing the Light.

Richard Winham shares a conversation with Grafted Culture, the Dutch-American sister duo with an international indie folk-pop sound who now live in the Chattanooga area.

Richard Winham shares a conversation with Garry Posey and Bea Burbank on “Matilda: The Musical” - premiering Friday, July 8th at Signal Mountain Playhouse.

Richard Winham shares his conversation with Patty Griffin, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter.

(aired Weds 6/22/22)

Richard Winham shares a conversation with poet Howard Brown, whose new collection is “Variations in the Perception of Color.”

Richard Winham shares a conversation with Rachel McIntyre Smith, the Chattanooga singer-songwriter, on her new album “Glory Daze.”

Richard Winham speaks with Courtenay Cholovich, Andrew Ledbetter and Matt Harris, the three standup comedians producing, hosting and performing in the Scenic City Super Show on Saturday night at Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga.

Richard Winham shares a conversation with author Deborah Levine, whose most recent work is a radio play “Untold” - coming to WUTC next month.

(aired Weds 5/04/22)

Richard Winham shares the second part of a conversation with Rachelle Barr - the singer and songwriter who performs as Cartinglee - on this week’s Talking Writing.

Richard Winham shares the first part of a conversation with Rachelle Barr - the singer and songwriter who performs as Cartinglee - on this week’s Talking Writing.

Richard Winham shares part two of his conversation with poet, artist and educator Christian J. Collier - whose most recent collection of poems is “The Gleaming of the Blade.”

Richard Winham shares the first part of his conversation with poet, artist and educator Christian J. Collier - whose most recent collection of poems is “The Gleaming of the Blade.”

Richard Winham shares the second part of his conversation with poet Helga Kidder on “Learning Curve,” her new collection of poetry that traces the arc of her life from her native Germany to Chattanooga today.

Richard Winham shares the first part of his conversation with poet Helga Kidder on “Learning Curve,” her new collection of poetry that traces the arc of her life from her native Germany to Chattanooga today.

Richard Winham shares a conversation with singer-songwriter Charlotte Simon, who has just released her first album.

Flannery O’Connor was born nearly a century ago in Savannah, Georgia - and her complex legacy as a Southern Gothic writer reverberates to this day.

“Flannery’s Cafe” is a play that delves into her notions of prejudice, grace and redemption through the characters in her stories.

Written by Peggy Douglas and Jason Tinney, the play opens Friday at Chattanooga State Community College, in partnership with the nonprofit Mark Making.

Due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, a public talkback will be held after the play - moderated by Donivan Brown, director of the Horton-Keller Center for Traumatic Healing in East Chattanooga.

In back-to-back conversations about the play, I spoke with Peggy Douglas and Donivan Brown - and our own Richard Winham spoke with Jason Tinney.

Richard Winham speaks with Marilyn Forsythe - wife of the late Chattanooga chef Neville Forsythe - about “Gone Nuts About Herbs,” a collection of his favorite recipes that she edited.

Richard Winham shares a conversation with Lisa Baker - guitarist, composer, painter and educator - who will give a presentation at UTC on Monday, February 28th on some of the women whose seminal creative influence has been largely overlooked.

Richard Winham shares the second part of his conversation with Robert Gwaltney, vice president of Easter Seals North Georgia - and author of the debut novel “The Cicada Tree,” set in a small Mississippi town in the 1950’s.

Richard Winham shares the first part of his conversation with Robert Gwaltney, vice president of Easter Seals North Georgia - an author of the debut novel “The Cicada Tree,” set in a small Mississippi town in the 1950’s.

(aired Weds 11/24/21)

Richard Winham speaks with Douglas Wolk, author of the book “All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told,” published by Penguin Random House.

Richard Winham shares a conversation with Dr. Jing Tsu, literary scholar and cultural historian at Yale University, on her new book, “Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern.”

(aired Weds 1/19/22)

Richard Winham shares a conversation with author Gwen Kirby on her debut collection of short stories.

(aired Weds 1/12/22)

Richard Winham shares the second part of conversation with four writers in the Chattanooga area: Helga Kidder, Cynthia Young, KB Ballentine and Rachel Landrum Crumble.

(aired Weds 1/05/22)

Richard Winham shares the first part of conversation with four writers in the Chattanooga area: Helga Kidder, Cynthia Young, KB Ballentine and Rachel Landrum Crumble.