John Dufresne's Requiem Mass

GPB's Jesse Freeman interviews John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass on Cover to Cover this week:

Requiem, Mass. is the tale of 8^th grade boy struggling to keep his family together despite the lies of his absent father and the delusions of his pathological mother. It’s also the tale of that same boy, grown to be a writer and teacher, struggling to save his adult sister from the residuals of the tumultuous childhood they shared. It is on these two planes that our narrator, John, entertains and edifies with rip-roaring humor and breathtaking pathos.

It is also on these two planes that fiction and memoir converge. See, John Dufresne is that writer/professor with the mixed up family, and his writing is perhaps so poignant and powerful because it inspired by the real-life obstacles he’s been confronted with throughout his life.

In our interview, Dufresne is surprisingly forthcoming about the aspects of memoir that permeate this novel. He talks about what is real and what isn’t, and about the precarious gray area that he has created by couching this work as a novel. Truth, it seems, is indeed stranger than fiction. Airing this Sunday at 8:00PM, its GPB's Cover to Cover. Tune in!

Gay And Lesbian History of Atlanta, Sunday at 8pm on Cover To Cover

Join us as GPB Southern Lit Cadre member Jeff Calder interviews Wesley Chenault and Stacy Braukman, who have written Gay and Lesbian Atlanta. The book grew out of a 2005 Atlanta History Center exhibit called "The Unspoken Past-Atlanta Lesbian and Gay History," which explored an alternative history of Atlanta that runs parallel to the city's rise as a regional center of industry, arts, and culture.

Calder's rollicking chat with Chenault and Braukman touches on things humorous and poignant, and a time when Atlanta then, as now, was a magnet for people from across the South who came to the city to live lives they couldn't often openly live in surrounding smaller communities. If you are a student of Southern and Atlanta history, this interview will give you a new perspective.