NewSouth’s reissue of Frank Sikora’s authorized biography of Judge Frank Johnson, The Judge, offers a definitive, personal insight into this important man. The following list of Internet resources serves to enhance the information presented in the book:

A short story by Charles Rose, author of In the Midst of Life, was recently featured in the Alabama Literary Review.

“Vigil” is about a Southern woman, Shirley Carmichael, who sells life insurance and lives with her terminally ill husband, Wiley. The story tells of the sacrifices that Shirley makes while reconciling how to be both a good mother and a steadfast caregiver to her husband.

Charles Rose has said the story was inspired by his own experience working with the terminally ill as a Hospice volunteer.

For the full story, see the Spring 2007 edition of The Alabama Literary Review, available from Amazon.com or by contacting Ed Hicks at 334-670-3971.

The Alabama Literary Review is a state literary medium representing local and national submissions and is published annually.

Jim Harrell, 83, author of the civil war novel, Their Last Ten Miles, and February Mission, a collection of poems and plays, died July 7 at his home in Tampa, Florida. He had been battling cancer for the past two years.

Jim was a native of Thomaston, Alabama, but had lived all over the world during his long and productive life. In World War II, he was a crewman on B-17 bombers and flew 28 missions over Germany, including one over Dresden that he recalled later in his signature poem, “February Mission.” After the war Jim studied at the University of California at Berkeley and the Sorbonne. He lived in Hong Kong while working for an airline with routes in the Far East, and later in New York, London, Tahiti, and San Francisco while working in the hotel industry. Still later, he joined his brother Stan in a company providing pharmaceutical management services.

Though he achieved great success as a businessman, Jim’s heart was always with literature and writing. He wrote numerous poems, plays, and a novel. He attributed his love for writing to the encouragement he had been given by a high school teacher in rural Alabama. That teacher showed him that he could not only enjoy reading poems, he could write them himself. And he did, until near the end of his life when his final illness overtook him.

Two years ago, in honor of his long-ago teacher, Jim endowed the James Harrell Poetry Prize for Alabama high school students, and he donated copies of his last two books and a collection of poems by Alabama poets laureate to every high school library in Alabama.
Jim was a generous and compassionate man who had a poet’s sensibilities and powers of description. He will be missed.

The following from Mark Ethridge, author of Grievances:

Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and novelist (The Bridge, Magic Time) died this week in a Mississippi car wreck at age 57. He was one of my best friends for thirty-five years.

Our friendship began in 1972 at The Charlotte Observer where I was a rookie reporter and he was the editorial cartoonist, his first real job.

It was a rare, special time. We were young, rebellious, just coming off Kent State and the anti-war movement.¬† (I was still 29 when I got to be The Observer‘s managing editor — seven years after marching in the streets.)

We were crusaders. It’s why we got into the business. Imagine this:

Doug was the lightning rod, the lead point on the flying wedge of journalists who so inflamed the publisher and the populace that what the rest of us did looked mild in comparison.

More recently, Doug taught me about writing novels. There are conventions in novel writing, the way there are conventions in writing for a newspaper or writing a legal brief. If you are a reader, you may experience some of these conventions but when you become a writer you find that they have already been intellectualized and that there is a code. (You just didn’t know it.)

I learned many of these rules when I gave Doug the first 185 pages of Grievances when he came to visit at the beach. He disappeared into his room and emerged five or six hours later. He suggested we go down to the dock and that I take something to write with. He proceeded to give me a list of 10 things I needed to know about novel-writing and obviously didn’t — things like ‘Never say or reveal anything important about a character when the character is not on stage.’

I rewrote Grievances as a result

About every six months thereafter I would get a call from Doug. “Do you still have that list?” he would ask. “And would you mind faxing it to me?”

Doug Marlette’s website, including memorial information, is at www.dougmarlette.com.

The following from Mark Ethridge, author of Grievances:

Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and novelist (The Bridge, Magic Time) died this week in a Mississippi car wreck at age 57. He was one of my best friends for thirty-five years.

Our friendship began in 1972 at The Charlotte Observer where I was a rookie reporter and he was the editorial cartoonist, his first real job.

It was a rare, special time. We were young, rebellious, just coming off Kent State and the anti-war movement.¬† (I was still 29 when I got to be The Observer‘s managing editor — seven years after marching in the streets.)

We were crusaders. It’s why we got into the business. Imagine this:

A 16-page special section with no advertising which said North Carolina had a moral obligation to stop being a state where the most valuable cash crop (tobacco) kills people.

10 reporters for eight months on brown lung disease in the textile industry an eight-day series of maybe 32 pages that won a public service Pulitzer.

More than 10 years on PTL . . . and endless reporters, lawyer bills and scorn from the public. And another Pulitzer.

Two reporters and a photographer assigned to find the source of the Catawba River and follow it to the sea, writing about the people and the land along the way. 32 pages. Special paper. No advertising.

Doug was the lightning rod, the lead point on the flying wedge of journalists who so inflamed the publisher and the populace that what the rest of us did looked mild in comparison.

More recently, Doug taught me about writing novels. There are conventions in novel writing, the way there are conventions in writing for a newspaper or writing a legal brief. If you are a reader, you may experience some of these conventions but when you become a writer you find that they have already been intellectualized and that there is a code. (You just didn’t know it.)

I learned many of these rules when I gave Doug the first 185 pages of Grievances when he came to visit at the beach. He disappeared into his room and emerged five or six hours later. He suggested we go down to the dock and that I take something to write with. He proceeded to give me a list of 10 things I needed to know about novel-writing and obviously didn’t — things like ‘Never say or reveal anything important about a character when the character is not on stage.’

I rewrote Grievances as a result

About every six months thereafter I would get a call from Doug. “Do you still have that list?” he would ask. “And would you mind faxing it to me?”

Doug Marlette’s website, including memorial information, is at www.dougmarlette.com.

Grievances is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.