Tom Franklin, the 2001-2002 Grisham Writer in Residence, and his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, who received the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book for her collection Open House, melded their voices to read their work at the Center’s Brown Bag program on Wednesday, March 6. 
Franklin and Fennelly read, among other works, a short story titled “The Saint of Broken Objects,” a collaborative piece about the changes marriage partners endure. The writers read the parts they had each written, shifting voices to allow the audience to hear the alternate views of husband and wife.
The story, which was written at the MacDowell Colony, a colony for writers and artists in New Hampshire, began as an idea when Franklin began moving into his house in Illinois. “I kept breaking things and I said suddenly out of nowhere, ‘In his 37th year he became clumsy,’” Franklin said. “We thought that was sort of a good line. So we started throwing words at one another and writing them down and soon we had the draft of a story.” 
The couple also read their individual works of literature. Fennelly read several poems dealing with such topics as space probes and breast feeding. 
Fennelly recently gave birth to the couple’s first child, Claire, and has written many poems about motherhood. She said she tried to capture things she was unprepared for in parenting. “One of the things that I was unprepared for was breast feeding,” Fennelly said. “It is so much harder and better than I could have guessed. It is a part of our society that has been left out, that some people don’t talk about.”
Another of Fennelly’s poems comments on a decision to replace with a stick figure an engraving of a pregnant woman set to go on a NASA space probe, designed to show alien life form a glimpse of human life. “It struck me odd,” Fennelly said. “First of all, what would be so upsetting about a pregnant woman? But also, what would a stick figure drawing of a pregnant woman look like?”
Franklin and Fennelly have had to schedule work around the demands of their new infant. Fennelly measures time in “B.C.” and “A.C.,” before and after Claire. “There is so much about having her and raising her and caring for her that is fiercer and more wonderful and complex and isn’t reflected in that pastel, sort-of focused picture of the mom and the little baby,” Fennelly said.
Curtis Wilkie, a visiting professor in journalism and an audience member, said he had heard Fennelly read before. “She had a reading a few months ago. I came to hear Wordsworth, but I heard Allen Ginsberg instead,” Wilkie said. “She has kind of a hip style.”
Franklin also read a portion of a novel in progress, “Hell at the Breech,” about the so-called Mitcham War, an 1890s family feud that occurred near Franklin’s birthplace in Dickinson, Alabama. Franklin started writing this tragic novel after his publisher turned down a comedy and told him that he’s better at writing dark and violent works.”
Franklin’s biggest problem on the current novel is writing about the past. “It’s been horrible,” he said. “I will never start another historical novel. The next thing I write will have happened yesterday and have cell phones in it.”
After his reading, Franklin commented on his grammar. “Some of my students are in the audience. I’ve told them how evil adverbs are, and there must be 20 adverbs in the selection I just read.”
Franklin and Fennelly will leave Oxford at the end of the summer to go to Sewanee, Tennessee. Fennelly said that she loves the people in Oxford and that she regrets having to leave. “I love Oxford,” Fennelly said. “I think it’s a paradise. I told Joe Urgo [English Department chair] that I’d handcuff myself to the stairway in our house and they’d just have to come and cut me out.” 
Shane Scara

Editor’s Note: Fortunately, Fennelly will be in Oxford during the coming year, teaching poetry in the English Department. Franklin will be writer in residence at the University of the South in Sewanee. The couple, and Claire, will have residences in both places, travelling between Oxford and Sewanee on a weekly basis.