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POLLY'S GHOST
I began this novel for a friend whose mother died in childbirth. Then, as happens with novels, many new characters intervened. Some people find this a little confusing, but I'm happy to think that ghosts, by nature, are confused...and so are their novels! First published by Scribner in 2000,POLLY'S GHOST can now be purchased as an Authors Guild backinprint.com edition. SNAP
This was my first novel, a look at six people, many of them strangers to each other, whose paths cross during the separation and rejuvenation of a marriage. The world of SNAP is skewed, oddball, surreal, and I remember that to write it felt playful and strange, as if I had entered an intricate hall of mirrors. LIFE BEFORE DEATH
The writing of this novel was compelled by a local museum fire, and the discovery of a lump in my breast. Fact became fiction, resulting in a story Julia Glass calls "exquisitely strange...It bushwacks, in hilarious detail, through private female terrain." I liked viewing the museum dolls after the fire; they lay in their boxes like charred talismans. Fruit of the Month
My first collection of stories, published in 1987, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. LICORICE
I began writing LICORICE during a lush Ohio summer; the air suffused with something I imagined as longing. This was a seductive process; I wrote out of a haze of shapeless, but literate, yearning. Much later, a reader confessed that the book was partly responsible for the end of her marriage. ARE YOU MINE?
Writing ARE YOU MINE?, I was determined to embrace a charged realism by which my heroine might give voice to issues surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion. I began the book by feverishly taking notes during the delivery of my son. That chapter, THRONE OF BLOOD was anthologized in Gloria Norris’ Seasons of Women. FOR KEEPS
Gayle Brandeis writes of FOR KEEPS: "Virginia Woolf once said that she hadn't been able to tell the truth about her experiences as a body.I wish she could read this book today." |
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