The Eye Doctor: Pieces written before 2008 refer to my mother in the present tense, as she helped me a lot with Glen Rock.
The Competition: Caroline Knapp’s bestseller was Drinking: A Love Story.
Who Dat: I originally described the assisted suicide in an August 1994 commentary for All Things Considered; this grew into a section of First Comes Love.
The Queen of the Scene: The quote is from “She’s About a Mover,” by Margaret Moser, which appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of the Oxford American.
The Southern Writer: The book is Wolf Whistle, by Lewis Nordan. The comparison to the blues was originally made by Michael Harris, in a review in the Los Angeles Times.
The Old Rake: The lines quoted are Gary Cartwright’s, from Texas Monthly.
The Belligerent Stream: I learned about the burial of the Jones Falls from a coffee-table book called Lost Baltimore, by Gregory J. Alexander and Paul Kelsey Williams, and read more about it in Sergey Kadinsky’s Hidden Waters Blog, hiddenwatersblog.wordpress.com. The secret waterfall appeared in Kill Me Now, by Timmy Reed.
The Leader of the Pack: The book I mention is How Animals Grieve, by Barbara J. King.