My dad was, and still is, a factory worker. I don’t have a lot of warm feelings about factories, and that’s evident in my short stories and in the novel I’m working on now. My mom is a homemaker. They both love to read, and so there were always books in my house, and we made a family trip to the library about once a week to restock. My parents liked mysteries, horror, True Crime books. Mom loved frontier novels like Little House on the Prairie; Daddy was always getting Westerns. Their books were scattered around the house, spread open on the edge of the bathtub or on the armrest of my father’s recliner, so that I could dip in and out whenever I liked—and that’s how I discovered Stephen King and Ira Levin and the Black Dahlia murders, all of that dark, good stuff. My folks were also big fans of horror and sci-fi movies. Watching the mini-series of It was a family event, though the clown gave me nightmares. Heck, I got nightmares at the mere idea of a movie. There was this one that was stocked at our local video store called The Incredible Melting Man. I’d sneak over there and just stare at the cover, intentionally freaking myself out. It was about an astronaut who went to Saturn, picked up some kind of flesh-eating disease, and had to murder people to stay alive. Yeah, good stuff. I don’t write horror fiction, and I certainly don’t write anything as awful and fantastic as that incredible melting astronaut, but I think my short stories are a product of the upbringing sketched out above: the working-class lifestyle and values, the shadow of the factory, and those wonderful, scary genre novels and movies. I married at the age of 19, at which point my husband and I moved to Lexington, KY, to both pursue undergraduate degrees at University of Kentucky. It's there that I was mentored by Nikky Finney, a poet, and Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter; it's also at UK that I was introduced to Kentucky's rich literary tradition. One of my favorite memories of that time was getting to see friends and contemporaries Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and James Baker Hall all take the stage together for a group reading. I learned as an undergraduate that fiction can be textured and subtle and artful. I read and imitated short story writers such as Mason, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford, because their plainspoken depictions of regular people, people of the kind I’d grown up among—of the kind I frankly was—resonated with me. But I didn’t lose my affection for the genre fiction of my childhood, and in the years since then I’ve discovered writers whose literary fiction borrows from those horror novels, Westerns, and thrillers my parents loved: Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx, to name a few. When George Pelicanos selected my story “Proof of God” for Best American Mystery Stories, I was rightly thrilled—not just because of the honor, but because one of my literary stories, a story published in a respected literary journal, had been deemed a “mystery.” When I brought my parents a copy of that anthology, my mother immediately sat down and read my story from beginning to end, as the rest of us watched TV and carried on conversations and as my dogs wrestled in the floor and demanded attention. That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid. But you know, that’s how we always read our books when I was a kid: with the TV running, or a couple of TVs running, and a dozen other distractions big and small. The fiction had to be good enough to take you out of that life for a while. That’s the kind of fiction I try to write.
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