Richard J. Alley

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

June 4, 2013

Samantha Hicks came to Memphis with a husband, a 3-year-old daughter and a master’s degree in social work.

Her husband, Adam, was going to work at the University of Memphis, but she had no job and no contacts.

Although the writing part worried her, she said, “You know what, I’m just going to do it. Volunteering has always been something I wanted to do, but actually contacting the agencies and finding out what you need to do is kind of scary.”

It became a crash course in Memphis nonprofit groups and in networking. “It’s been awesome,” said Hicks, 26. “I haven’t had a bad experience.”

Through her blogging, Hicks landed a job after blog readers alerted her to openings. She is putting her University of Tennessee degree to use as a social worker for the Ave Maria Home, an assisted-living and nursing facility.

Kevin Nowlin, 38, already enjoyed writing and was looking for a way to showcase his abilities. The marketing consultant signed up for Volunteer Odyssey after a freelance project ended.

“I was job hunting all day, working on résumés, kind of pulling my hair out e-mail blasting my résumé to different jobs,” Nowlin said. “I was sitting at home all day, and I just really wanted to do something that I feel like had purpose … rather than wallowing in my self-absorbed job hunt.”

Nowlin has had some interest, and his work with Volunteer Odyssey led to an interview with an employer who read his blog. “It was good to get out and have a face-to-face interview,” he said.

His week turned out to be “more than I hoped for.” He mentions specifically his day with SRVS, a facility providing residential, employment, clinical and learning services to people with disabilities . . . (read more)

Grand prize winning short story “Sea Change” anthologized by Contemporary Media in the e-book FIVE THAT GRABBED THE GOLD.

From the Memphis Magazine blog 901:

Titled Five that Grabbed the Gold, this volume contains the grand-prize winning stories from the Memphis magazine fiction contest from 2008 through 2012.

The authors, several of whom now have published novels to their credit, include Courtney Miller Santo, Richard Alley, David Williams, Ellen Morris Prewitt, and Jackson McKenzie. Each of them won $1,000 for the grand prize and publication of their story in the magazine.

We’re pleased to give area writers a chance to compete in a well-respected contest, which we have sponsored since 1989. And now, by making this book of stories available on Kindle for your mobile device, we give the contest and some our winning authors wider and much-deserved exposure.

Click here to purchase e-book from the Amazon Kindle store.

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

May 30, 2012

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

“My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book,” Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as “chaotic,” yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, “The Roots of the Olive Tree” (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family’s olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It’s a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, “ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots.”

It’s a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that’s only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo … (read more)

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 29, 2012

I’m in the minority in my house in that I don’t read young adult fiction. The kids read it. My wife, an English teacher at Central High School, reads it. I think I can’t get into it for a couple of reasons. First, I’m a not-young adult. Second, I don’t really go in for fantasy and science fiction and the lot. This may put me in the minority of all of today’s readers, come to think of it, but I need the action to take place in real cities and countries; I need the plot to twist on something other than time travel, wizardry or the backs of sparkly vampires.

Regardless of my views on young adult literature, there is no escaping the latest craze, “The Hunger Games.” There are more than 20 million books in print, and the film adaptation opened last weekend with a record-breaking box office. Well played, author Suzanne Collins.

It seems that quite a bit of such books has to do with a postapocalyptic world, a dystopian future where a person relies on wits and cunning to survive against roving bands of marauders, dictatorial and all-seeing governments, or zombies. My family wouldn’t make it very far in such a world. I hope they’re learning survival skills by reading these books and watching these films, but if it comes down to who can get to the dwindling food supplies first, we’ll starve waiting for 5-year-old Genevieve to find her shoes so we can leave the house … (read more)

Feature lifestyle story for The Commercial Appeal

March 15, 2012

When “The Hunger Games,” the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling young adult novel, is released on March 23, 16-year-old Destiny Crump is sure to be one of the first in a theater seat.

The junior at Central High School read the book as a summer reading assignment last year, but was caught up in the suspense and drama regardless of the homework label attached to it.

“I didn’t think I would like it at first, but it turned out to be really, really good and interesting,” she said. “It put me in a different mindset, like it could possibly happen.”

Jimmie Tashie is excited about the movie as well. The vice president and general manager for Malco Theatres Inc. said his company is “happy to have another series coming out; they’re talking about this like perhaps it’s another ‘Twilight’-type series. With the end of ‘Harry Potter’ and some of the long-running sequels, the idea of a new one coming along is pretty exciting, because it usually means there’ll be as many movies as there are books.”

The Hollywood Reporter reported last month that anticipation for the movie set a new record for advance ticket sales previously held by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” in May 2010. Malco Theatres is planning for a huge weekend of sales and is beginning it as early as possible, with 12:01 a.m. showings at a number of theaters around the area on March 23.

In the dystopian future of the novel, with more than 23 million copies in print, Collins has woven a tale of class struggle, dictatorial government, survival of the fittest, the human instinct toward fight or flight, and fierce familial loyalty … (read more)

Feature story for Rhodes Magazine.

Winter 2012

 … how does the college work within the community? How do the philosophy and theory from textbooks, lectures and the Internet seep from the campus into the surrounding neighborhoods, the arms of the city, the region of the Delta? Consider that almost three-quarters of the Rhodes student body come from places other than Tennessee and the question becomes, “How do we encourage our students to become part of the Memphis community at large and engage with our culture, people and causes?”

There are a number of ways students garner knowledge from real-world experiences and activities, and several Rhodes institutes and groups are leading the charge in ensuring that the college contributes to the greater community … (read more)

Discovery 901 feature for The Downtowner magazine

Feb. 2012

Feature article on the Shelby Foote collection of papers, manuscripts, notebooks, artwork and ephemera now housed at Rhodes College in Memphis. (read more)

The Downtowner, Feb. 2012

Feature profile for The Commercial Appeal

Oct. 16, 2011

To hear Emil Henry tell it, climbing the Matterhorn at 55 years old wasn’t so difficult. There was little training, only to be tested on skills, endurance and altitude sickness; it wasn’t even a life’s dream.

“As tall, high mountains go, it’s probably the easiest of all the high mountains in the Alps now,” Henry said of the summit that has seen 431 deaths, 58 in the 21st century alone.

Researching and writing a biography of Edward Whymper, the first person ever to scale the 14,690-foot mountain, however, became a monumental task of endurance, travel and expense. And a challenge he wouldn’t give up for anything.

“It turned out to be the most enjoyable occupation of my life,” Henry said of the book, “Triumph and Tragedy: The Life of Edward Whymper” ($18.31).

Henry, now 82 with three children and five grandchildren, began life in Memphis, growing up in Chickasaw Gardens before going away to a boarding high school in Pennsylvania and college at Yale. He joined the Navy during the Korean War, spending three years on a destroyer in the Pacific Ocean, and then went to Vanderbilt for law school.

After practicing law in Memphis for five years, he was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission in 1962. When the chairman resigned only eight months later, Henry was appointed, “at the ripe old age of 34,” chairman of the FCC by President John F. Kennedy … (read more)

Victoria Ford, a child of the Memphis political dynasty, survived her parents’ disgrace to stand on a stage in Carnegie Hall and accept a national writing award

Feature profile for Chapter 16 (an online journal about books and writers, sponsored by Humanities Tennessee)

June 29, 2011

“You may not understand this now, but she isn’t coming back. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Day after that. And no, she hasn’t left anything behind—a sticky note on the refrigerator door or a quick message for the answering machine, her voice a distant echo calling your name and mine. Nothing.”

So begins the award-winning essay “To a Restless Little Brother Calling for Mama in His Sleep,” one of the five essays that last month helped Victoria Ford, eighteen, win a national Scholastic Art and Writing Award—and a $10,000 college scholarship. Past winners of the prestigious award include Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, and Truman Capote. For Ford, the awards ceremony, held May 31 in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, was a moment to remember, one that surely marks the beginning of a life of creativity and success.

Victoria’s last name might not be so well known as the literary giants who took home the Scholastic prize years ago, but it already carries a kind of notoriety in her hometown of Memphis. Harold Ford Sr., the first African-American Tennessean elected to Congress since Reconstruction, was her uncle. Harold Ford Jr., now retired from Congress, is her cousin. Other family members have been elected to the city council, the county commission, and the school board in Memphis. Victoria’s father, John Ford, was a state senator for three decades, another cog in the familial political machine.

Among young African Americans growing up in Memphis, Victoria’s story is far from typical. Memphis is a city with higher-than-average rates of poverty, drug use, single-parent homes, and criminal recidivism, but Victoria grew up in a two-story brick home with a mother and father. She attended an above-average city school … (read more)

Feature story for the Rhodes Magazine

Summer 2011

As moves go, it wasn′t such a great distance. Only a little over two miles to be exact, from the study of a turreted, fairy-tale-like house on East Parkway to the Gothic, shady campus on North Parkway. Nevertheless, the acquisition by Rhodes College of the Shelby Foote Collection of writings, papers, hand-drawn maps, photos and memorabilia is such that it will take researchers and students on a journey through decades worth of history, stories and lessons.

The collection is a major gain for the college. On a rainy March morning in the warm confines of the Paul Barret Jr. Library, dignitaries and notables gathered to see and speak about the significance of the Foote collection to the worlds of literature, research, history and Rhodes itself.

As President Bill Troutt said that morning, the acquisition of the Foote collection “is a very special moment in the life of our college.”

Though many of the items had been on loan for years to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there was never much doubt that Foote’s ties to Rhodes were strong, as he received an honorary degree in 1982 and lectured on campus in 1988 and 1991.

When son Huger Foote set out to find a permanent home for his father’s vast collection of papers and books, he kept the elder Foote’s wishes and beliefs close to heart. Huger says of his task: “With that spirit in mind, things were somewhat simplified. At any juncture, I only needed to ask, ‘What would my father have wanted?’ and follow that course … It was important to me that the entire collection be kept intact and preserved in its full integrity to inspire and, I think, amaze this and future generations of scholars. Rhodes shares this vision.” … (read more)