Reporter and columnist Trimble to be subject of Wordsworth Books discussion

“The Thane of Cawdor Comes to Bauxite: And Other Whimsy and Wisdom From the Pen of Mike Trimble,” a collection of the work of the late columnist and editorialist Mike Trimble, will be featured at a reading and celebration at Wordsworth Books in Little Rock on Saturday, June 10, at 5 p.m.

Trimble was an Arkansas-born writer who had a celebrated career as a reporter and editor for six different newspapers in Arkansas and Texas. His career spanned forty-eight years, starting at the Texarkana Gazette and followed by jobs at the Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Times, Pine Bluff Commercial, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle. His remarkable observational skills and downto-earth writing lent unusual humanity to his articles—whether they were news, features, or columns—and he always developed a large and fanatical following wherever he went. Trimble died on November 20, 2021, in Denton.

Journalist 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 nearly-five-decade search for humor and meaning in the lives and events that he captured as a reporter, columnist and editorialist.

Whether he was chronicling, in the 1980s, rising political worthies like the far-intothe-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.

“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.”

RSVP for the event by emailing lynne@ wordsworthbooks.com.