-
Reviews of Morkan’s Quarry
from Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies I swear, Yates introduces characters so genuinely and fully, you’re stunned to discover they weren’t figures borrowed from history…. Yates can set a scene with the best of them, and capture the broad vistas of battle as ably as he evokes the most tender exchanges between family and…
-
What I didn’t have time to read at History is Lunch
Watching time and leaving a chunk of it for questions didn’t allow me to read from Morkan’s Quarry when I spoke August 11 at History is Lunch. I wouldn’t trade the fifteen minutes of Q&A we exchanged Wednesday at the Winter Archives for the world! But below is what I would have read from the…
-
History is Lunch: Who let the novelists out???
Lecture given August 11, 2010 at History as Lunch lecture series, William Winter Archives Building, Jackson, MS I want to thank Chrissy Wilson for inviting me to speak at History as Lunch. I’m not certain how many other novelists, fiction writers have spoken here, so I am humbled by this privilege and I am very…
-
Introduction to a reading at St. Paul’s Catholic Church
Prayer of St. Francis de Sales May the Lord guide me and all those who write for a living. Through your prayers, St. Francis de Sales, I ask for your intercession as I attempt to bring the written word to the world. Let us pray that God takes me in the palm of His hand…
-
Oops! Someone published the marketing director
Delivered at Salt Lake City’s AAUP meeting June 17, 2010 because Colleen Lanick made me do it I want to thank Colleen Lanick, publicity manager of MIT Press, for inviting me to share with you all an author’s experience in the current marketing climate. Throughout the sixteen years I’ve been in the university press community,…
-
Father’s Day history
originally at Lemuria Books blog I was born on Father’s Day, 1968, in Springfield, Missouri. When I hear someone nowadays cry, “Oh, who would want to bring a child into this world?,” I marvel at what my then 28-year-old Dad, Carl Yates, faced bringing a son into 1968. Vietnam was raging. The Tet offensive had…
-
What I almost said before recalling: It’s all about the characters!
Here’s what I almost said. Preparing to give Morkan’s Quarry its first launch in Mississippi at my hometown bookstore, Lemuria in Jackson, I thought tons about Ozarks history needed explaining. So I was going to light in with all this stuff that follows. “If you will indulge me, let me tell you a little about…
-
The miracle of readers
Readers are a miracle. I know that now after powering through the marketing an author needs to do to make signings work. Thank goodness I had help from Moon City Press and especially James Baumlin who masterminded two of the signing events in Springfield. Without that assistance and without these signings, how would I have…
-
Tips and rules to use in writing historical fiction
These are the lecture notes I used at Missouri State in W. D. Blackmon’s class and at the Creamery Arts Center. Have any of you written fiction set at a time before you had the ability to remember, set at a time before your first memory? Are you comfortable with it being called historical fiction?…
-
A report from halfway
I think today (Wednesday, 4.21.2010) marks about the halfway point in a return trip to the Ozarks to bring Morkan’s Quarry to what I imagined to be its core audience. A summing up, then, is in order. Thursday morning (4.15.2010) at Ozarks Technical Community College, my longtime writing friend Michael Pulley and my former boss…
Fiction and History 