Event: The Writings of Mike Trimble, a Conversation with Ernie Dumas and Friends

The Thane of Cawdor Comes to Bauxite: And Other Whimsy and Wisdom From the Pen of Mike Trimble is coming to Wordsworth.

The collection of the wit and wisdom of Mike Trimble, Arkansas’s and perhaps the South’s most gifted humorist—at least since Mark Twain—is at Wordsworth and will be featured at a reading and celebration at the bookstore on Saturday, June 10, at 5:00 PM. 

Ernie Dumas, Trimble’s friend who collected and edited the volume, published by Butler Center Books and the University of Arkansas Press, will talk about Trimble’s 50-year search for humor and meaning in the lives and events that he captured as a reporter, columnist and editorialist at the Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the Denton, Texas, Record-Chronicle. It may include the famous “How to Bury a Dog” and one or two of the editorials that won Trimble an award for writing the best editorials in America in 2005, including his tirade against the accordion.

RSVP for this event HERE.

"Although of a relatively scarce breed," the Arkansas Times observed in the obituary of the itinerant writer it had once employed, "Mike Trimble was Arkansas's and perhaps the country's greatest self-deprecating journalist." Readers will find in this fifty-year inventory of Trimble's wit and wisdom all the vindication they might seek for that quaint judgment - the rare humble author. Whether he was chronicling, in the 1980s, rising political worthies like the far-into-the-future governors Asa Hutchinson and Mike Beebe, or, more often, the ordinary and feckless people that he encountered every day, befriended, and spent most of his career writing about, Trimble usually found a way, subtly or artlessly, to bring up his own failings, such as identifying the wrong person as the dead woman in an obituary he had written in his earliest days for his first employer, the Texarkana Gazette. Like the yokels in the vaudeville duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin, and Fey and Poehler, Trimble's confessed bumblings were purposeful and studied instruments of his humor.

Arkansas produced more than its quota of weirdos, fabulists, con men, oleaginous politicians, charlatans, creeps, visionaries, and fantastical creatures--from Albert Pike, Arvin the Wino, Dr. Brinkley the Great Depression's goat-gland sex therapist, Editor Weston, and the salty riverboat queen Ray Dorthy all the way to Say McIntosh and Red the Irish Setter. Mike Trimble, the South's best and funniest storyteller, put them all down on paper for some of the best reading since Catch-22. Trimble turned humor into art and history into vaudeville.