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Articles by Wayne Christeson
A Healing Journey
My name is Botum and I’m Cambodian. On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers captured Phnom Penh, the capital city of war-torn Cambodia, and began transforming the country into a vast and lethal forced-labor camp. By the time their reign of terror ended in 1979, an estimated one in four Cambodians was dead. My parents made it to the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand, and I was born there in 1980. A year later, my father, pregnant mother, and I immigrated to the United States.
Remembering George
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay appeared originally appeared on May 30, 2016. *** On Memorial Day I always think of my friend George Mangrum of Lauderdale County, Alabama. Here is his story. It needs to be told. In 1966, I graduated from a modest Alabama high school and went looking for a summer job. It was a time when the civil-rights movement was tearing the South apart, and the escalating war in Vietnam was devouring everything in its path.
With Bears in Winter
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on February 1, 2019. *** Back in the 1980s, while I was a member of the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, my wife Anne and I were allowed to take part in a black-bear research study in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The project was led by Dr. Michael Pelton, a zoology professor at the University of Tennessee.
Blooming in a Blizzard
Actual blizzards are rare in Tennessee (thank goodness!), but the chaos of living can feel as bewildering as a blizzard sometimes, for all of us. Poet and memoirist Joy Harjo grapples with this all-too-human confusion in her new collection of prose, Catching the Light, and finds the antidote in art. “It is the singers, poets, and storytellers who are captured by the expression of this eternal drama, and with language, metaphor, timing, and melody create meaningful shape.
The Leiper’s Fork Way
“Damn,” said Anne, rising from the dinner table. “What is it?” I said. “Blue’s out.” And, sure enough, I looked out the back window and there was Vida Blue greedily grazing in the tall grass of the back pasture, followed by Junebug and Sundown in a row. Blue was supposed to be dry-lotted behind the barn under a strict diet designed to cure a case of laminitis, commonly called “founder.” To be sure, rich green grass was not part of Blue’s diet.
Letters from Leiper's Fork
I promised a long time ago that I would steer clear of politics on this blog, and except for two instances I have done so. But sometimes the deadly pig-headedness of our leaders must be called out. I am speaking to you, Bill Lee, both as governor and as leader of the Republican Party in Tennessee. How many times must you be told that COVID is deadly, costly, and preventable?
Letters from Leiper's Fork
Bruce didn’t cry when the Old Man died, but he sure enough tightened his jaw a little. He knew it would happen eventually, but that didn’t make the pain any less. Bruce and I were sitting in the Country Boy having lunch one late winter day, when Laura Weaver stopped and said that it looked like a horse might have died down on the Big Farm.
Why I respect my friends who voted for Donald Trump
One of my angry liberal friends recently asked me whether, morally speaking, it was acceptable to maintain friendships with Trump supporters who, by their silence and inaction, are condoning all the awful things Trump has said and done. If my friend had read the New Testament, I think, he would have had his answer, morally, but there are many other precincts of life where remaining tolerant of Trump and his people is not so clear. I live in a rural corner of a very wealthy county in the South.
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