The Memoir: Four Ways

A quartet of Knoxville newspaper veterans, Sam Venable, Charlie Daniel, Vince Vawter, and Chris Wohlwend, talk about their recent books, all memoirs, but each done in a unique way.

Longtime News-Sentinel columnist Sam Venable explains how his East Tennessee upbringing shaped his method of choosing subjects and how that background enhanced his ability to find humor that doesn’t always seem evident.

Sam’s cohort and sometimes collaborator, Charlie Daniel, demonstrates his story-telling abilities with his pen, often helped by his fictional companion, Rosy, as she deals with her diner customers.

Vince Vawter spent several years trying to control Sam and Charlie when he was the News-Sentinel’s managing editor. After retiring he then turned his own experience into a prize-winning  trio of fictionalized books built around a newspaper career that began when he made daily deliveries as a paper boy.

Chris Wohlwend, who worked with Sam and Charlie at The Knoxville Journal when it was the morning daily, has written two conventional memoirs, the first about growing up in Burlington and then attending the University of Tennessee during the tumultuous Sixties, the second about his peripatetic career after leaving Knoxville in 1972.