BLOSSOMS

From my writing chair, I can see the apple tree. A few years ago, we thought we'd lost it. The apple turnout proved puny and most of the branches were completely bare. "It’s dying," my husband said. He called a tree trimmer who performed major surgery. A single healthy branch remained. The following spring, the tree came back, thriving. Branches sprouted from the trunk, blossoms bloomed, apples grew. We couldn't kill it if we wanted to.

There was a time my daughter would have rejoiced in its death. She was seven and her job was to pick up the fallen apples. Since most of them drop before they've ripened, this was quite a chore. She hated the task, even when my husband bribed her. "A penny an apple, Shannon," he'd say. (We try to forgive his meager offers. He was raised by parents who survived the depression.)

Fourteen years ago, we moved into our home. It was autumn. The naked trees and brown flowerbeds kept a big secret because the previous owner was a loyal gardener. Each season offered surprises--daffodils popping through snow, purple irises parading on Mother’s Day, a climbing Peace Rose commemorating summer break. And by Labor Day--apples.

That first spring, I marveled at the pinky white blossoms covering the tree outside our living room window. Whenever I caught a glimpse, I smiled. That afternoon, I had no idea apples would replace the flowers. But by mid-summer green apples littered the grass under the tree, and Shannon had a job.

When the tree burst in bloom the following spring, I called out in delight to my daughter. "Look, Shannon."

She glared at the tree and groaned. "Ugh! Apples!" In a few months, she would have to fill up plastic grocery sacks with its fruit.

It's only July, but the apples are already falling. My daughter is twenty-one now. She probably won't be picking up the apples this summer. I don't even ask her to pick up her room anymore. This is her last summer at home. When the apple blossoms arrive next spring, she will be taking her final mid-term exams. And about the time the blooms turn into tiny green fruit, she will cross a stage, accept her diploma and start a new life. A new life where people don't say things like, "A penny an apple," and "Please pick up your room so that you don’t break an ankle getting into bed."

Next year, the first year without her, I will sit in my writing chair and wish the apple tree had given up a few years back, instead of surviving, becoming sturdier each season. Then, out of the blue, Shannon will call. She'll tell me something that happened, something minor that could have waited, but I'll be glad it didn’t. That day I'll be reminded of the little girl who hated the apple tree and of the woman who will thrive and grow stronger each year, making a life of her own.

Kimberly Willis Holt writes from her home in West Texas where cottonwoods and mesquite grow freely, and with a little care, a few apple trees. To learn more about her books, please visit her website at http://www.kimberlywillisholt.com/

Sharyn McCrumb: Endangered Species: The Cosmic Possum

Endangered Species:

The Cosmic Possum

By Sharyn McCrumb

Consider my dining room: oil paintings of hunting scenes; an 8 ft. walnut pier mirror from a North Carolina plantation; an oak silver chest full of handmade English armorial silver (London 1790’s), sitting atop a heavily-carved Victorian walnut sideboard, and… propped up against that antique sideboard: the red and black side panel of a Nextel Cup car, autographed in silver Sharpie by Daytona 500 winner Ward Burton. What does this mean?

I am a Cosmic Possum.

The term, coined by Tennessee poet Jane Hicks, (Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia, Jesse Stuart Foundation Press, 2005) refers to people of Southern mountain heritage who have acquired modern sophistication without losing touch with their regional origins. It is the physicist who collects heirloom quilts; the environmental engineer singing Child Ballads; and my teenage daughter Laura, reading with equal ease the hallmarks on antique British sterling or NASCAR driver numbers on the back windows of pick-up trucks.

For cosmic possums culture is not an either- or proposition. The trick is to move into the future without letting go of the past, because if you lose your cultural identity, you have nothing to sustain you in the modern rootless world which lurches from one ephemeral trend to another.

Cosmic possums turn up in interesting places. A few years ago I was in Arizona to present the Ballad Music Program with bluegrass musician Jack Hinshelwood. We had a free day to kill after we finished the program, so we drove up to the Grand Canyon, which I had never seen. That evening we stopped at a fancy restaurant geared to the tourist trade. Besides its western buffet, the restaurant offered a program of Native American dances, performed by young boys from the local reservation. Nine-year old boys in the full regalia of traditional Navajo costumes drummed and danced their way through thousand-year old rituals, looking so perfect that, watching them, you’d believe it could be any century at all. Half an hour later, when we finished dinner, we walked out to the parking lot, and saw one of the young dancers. He still wore the traditional shirt and head-dress of his dance costume, but now he also wore jeans and sneakers. He was sitting on the running board of his dad’s truck, playing his GameBoy. Delighted, I whispered to Jack, “A cosmic armadillo!”

Individuals these days feel enormous pressure to surrender to the great national homogenization. Regional accents are ridiculed; hillbilly jokes and media stereotyping foster a sense of shame for one’s origins; and parts of the Southern mountains have been turned into a blurry Disneyland of current ethnic chic to accommodate the “new people.” Navajo flute music plays in the gift shops around Asheville, chalets and haciendas pepper the hillsides, and Kokopelli prances on turquoise and coral pottery a continent away from where he belongs.

Long ago I learned to value the gift of my heritage.

As a UNC undergrad, back when folk music was in flower, I bought a ten-dollar guitar from a Durham pawn shop and learned a repertoire of three-chord songs from a Joan Baez album. At Thanksgiving I went home to impress my mountain-born father with this new skill that his tuition money was making possible. I sat there on the sofa, playing a rendition of “John Riley,” just as I had learned it from the latest LP. To my astonishment, my father joined in, a little Ernest Tubb on the tune, but letter-perfect on the lyrics. Had he been listening to Baez ? No. He’d learned the song from his grandfather, he said. I checked the liner notes on my album: a Child ballad from the Scots border. My forebears had brought this old tune to America in the 1700’s, passing it down from parent to child for two hundred years. But I went to the Record Bar and paid $6.98 for it. My ancestors and their Appalachian neighbors preserved those old ballads which had been lost in Britain. Because of them the music survived so that there could be an era of folk music, but I had missed it.

I pass this along as a warning. You are the only link between the past and the future. If you throw away your cultural identity, if you refuse to pass on traditions, songs, and stories to the next generation, those treasures may be lost forever. If you’re lucky, some mainstream scavenger will sell you back your birthright for $6.98, but why let it go in the first place? Before we cross the road to the brave new world, Cosmic possums look both ways.

Sharyn McCrumb, a New-York Times best-selling Appalachian writer, won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award and the AWA Book of the Year Award for St. Dale, the story of a group of ordinary people who go on a pilgrimage in honor of NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt, and find a miracle. McCrumb, who was honored as a “Virginia Woman of History” for 2008, says: “Writing about NASCAR was a wonderful experience for me. After spending my adolescence writing term papers and avoiding proms, I am now jumping hills at 100 mph with a race car driver on Virginia backroads, and it is glorious. The books won literary awards, are taught throughout the region, got me invited to the White House, and put the Earnhardts and a Daytona 500 winner on my SpeedDial. I'm having much more fun than writers usually have.”
McCrumb is best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels. A film of The Rosewood Casket is currently in production.

ASSEMBLY REQUIRED by T. Lynn Ocean

An afternoon with author T. Lynn Ocean...

Summertime means spending lots of time outdoors, whether swinging in a hammock with a great book (like Southern Fatality!) or socializing at a neighborhood cookout. But summertime can also bring that dreaded message: Assembly Required.

My husband was walking stiffly, a look of fierce determination on his face, taking much longer than normal steps.

"Are you okay?" I asked, figuring he must have hurt his back.

He stopped in mid-stride. "Hmmm?"

"Can I get you some Advil or something? You're walking funny."

He was stepping off the distance of the deck to determine the best place to put our new gas grill, he explained, slightly annoyed that I'd broken his concentration. He went back to the far side of the deck, did the stiff-legged march thing again, and made a mental calculation. I imagined the new grill would end up in the same spot as the old charcoal one, but with my husband, some things are a process.

Once he decided where our new outdoor addition would go, he hauled the giant cardboard box to the deck and spread out its contents, telling me to get the chicken breasts ready to grill. He'd be done in half an hour, he predicted. Twenty minutes later, I brought him a Coke. Several crumpled pieces of paper—what I assumed to be diagrams and directions—lay scattered next to a variety of tools. The contraption in front of him resembled a grill, minus the tank and wheels, and little knobby things that turn it on.

"That side burner for pots," I said. "Shouldn't it be attached? And, uh, grate side up?"

"What?" he said, lying on his side to get a better look at the underside of the contraption.

"Never mind." I decided that I could always pan fry the chicken in the kitchen. "What's the deal with that baggie of parts over there."

"What parts? I've used all the parts."

"Oh. Probably, they're just extra parts. But that valve looks sort of important." I decided to hang out and offer moral support. Five minutes later, bored, I got the idea to measure the back yard. Starting in one corner with a straight back, I stepped it off to the other side. "Hey," I called to him. "How many feet are in one big step-off type step?"

"About three," he said, looking at me like I'd gone weird on him. "And they're called strides. Not steps. But your stride is shorter. Maybe two and a half feet. Why are you measuring our yard?"

"Did you figure out where that valve thingie goes?" I asked, counting my strides from the corner of the yard back to the deck.

He told me that if I wanted something measured, to let him know. Apparently, only men are allowed to step things off. And then he instructed me that our new grill was ready to be christened. I returned with a plate of marinated chicken breasts and skewered veggies to find hubby staring at the massive grill like the proud father of a newborn. When he tried to light it, I instinctively backed away several steps (two and a half strides, actually).

We heard clicking sounds, but no flames appeared. Frowning, he studied the grill, the extra parts, and smoothed out a crumpled instruction sheet. I left and returned with beers. Nearly an hour and a half after the assembly effort began, we finally had fire. Nothing blew up. Hubby smiled in victory. We ate outside, admiring our new grill, enjoying the evening sounds. The dinner was delicious.

"Would this be a bad time to mention that I bought a new teakwood patio set?" I said. "It was on sale."

He agreed that we needed some new outdoor furniture.

"It's uh, sort of in boxes," I mumbled. "Assembly required."

CHECK OUT T. LYNN OCEAN'S NEW MYSTERY SERIES. The first in the Jersey Barnes mysteries, Southern Fatality, is being reprinted in mass market paperback this July. Southern Poison, second in the series, comes out Sept. 2. For more info, visit the website at http://www.tlynnocean.com/

Secrets to Writing Success (How to get published when you've got laundry to do.)

I think the most common question I get when addressing a group is this: “How do you as the caregiver of your family find the time to write?” It’s a good question. So … here are my secrets to getting published while still schlepping kids around town in the minivan and making dinner every night:

First of all, the writing has to be poetry or fiction. One reason I left journalism was because I was too closely tied with the capricious schedules of my sources, who would frequently call at the most inconvenient times. (used diaper wipe in hand, pasta boiling on the stove) With fiction, most of your work is inside your head, and you can write anytime, anywhere. Which leads me to my next point:

Never go anywhere in the car/van/whatever without a laptop or, at the very least, a journal book. A caregiver often gets stuck waiting, and why should that waiting be down time? Twelve minutes here, four minutes there – it all adds up. Your work at these times doesn’t even have to include polished prose. It can be a time to brainstorm a character’s emotional arc or debate the pros and cons of a particular chapter ending.

Have a particular place in the house where you write, and make sure that every family member knows that when you are working in this spot you are NOT to be bothered. Warning: They will try to poke into your private little world several times until you have trained them properly. Do NOT drop what you’re doing to go help them find the mayonnaise in the refrigerator (It’s in the back, right-hand corner, by the way!) Let them know that they must respect your privacy and focus connected with this writing spot. Let them know (and this goes for your spouse as well) that a happy caregiver is one who gets his or her writing time each day … UNINTERRUPTED!

Promise yourself you’re going to write one single-spaced computer screen page five days a week. You might not think that sounds like much, a page a day, but that page is actually about 1.8 pages of a book, which means that in six months time you will have completed an entire first draft!

If all else fails, and life has been too chaotic to get any writing done, tell your spouse that you want a four-day weekend for Mother’s or Father’s Day. Get a cheap motel room somewhere nearby – but not too nearby – and write, write, write. I have written 40 pages in three days doing this. Give yourself a daily goal in the morning, and if you make that goal then go out and treat yourself for cocktails and dinner, and then come back and write some more.

And, of course, I have to mention the guilt. It’s hard for an unpublished writer to justify the time to write when he or she is not getting paid for it. True, once you sell a manuscript, you start feeling justified very quickly. But until then remind yourself that if you didn’t write you would not be truly happy or whole or challenged, and this feeling of disenchantment and emptiness would creep into your family life in the form of a bad mood; you will be more anxious and impatient. Just as your kids need their social time to be complete, you need this time to reflect and create, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. Let them know it is not merely a hobby, but an important part of who you are.

Remember that the Pulitzer prize-winning Canadian novelist Carol Shields, God rest her soul, didn’t publish until she was in her late forties or fifties; she was too busy raising a family the first two-thirds of her life. The good news about writing is that writers really don’t peak emotionally and intellectually until that last third of life, so don’t fret if you’re pushing forty and haven’t yet published that book. You’ve got plenty of time. Raise those kids. Enjoy them. Heck, they make great fodder for books; I’ve written two autobiographical novels based on being a caregiver. But beware: I got in big trouble with my daughter when I admitted on National Public Radio that the poop scene in “Househusband” was real!

Now, go write. And be protective of that writing time. You deserve it.

Ad Hudler’s newest novel, “Man of the House,” will be published by Random House this September. He can be reached through his website AdHudler.com.

Books, Tours, Memories by Caroline Haines

(Kate, Ellen, and Kim show a little reading spirit in Greenwood, Mississippi.)


This blog posts on the day I hit the road to begin promotion for WISHBONES, the eighth of the Sarah Booth Delaney Delta mysteries. Even with gas at over $4 a gallon, a crazy summer schedule, and the usual heat and bad weather potential, I wanted to visit some of the stores and people who’ve supported me through the years.

Wednesday, June 25, I’ll be at Capitol News & Books in Montgomery at noon, then on to Birmingham for a book signing at The Alabama Booksmith at 6 p.m. that includes a raffle with proceeds to go to Hand In Paws, an organization that helps people and animals. Anyone who reads my books can tell I’m an animal lover. I have many, many stray animals (5 dogs, 8 cats, and 7 horses, several of which were rescued). So when I can make a book signing help animals (and people), this is good.

On Thursday it’s over to the charming town of Wetumpka, Alabama for an evening fete called Summer Sumpthin’, which will become an annual event blending books with entertainment and good food. Tammy’s Bookbasket is the host and fellow author Kirk Curnutt and his band will entertain.

This is the beginning of a number of signings that will stretch through July and into August, concluding in the Mississippi Delta just in time for the Sunflower Blues Festival. (Sometimes the fates smile kindly upon a writer with good intentions.)

Back before I was published, I often fantasized about being in a bookstore and signing my name in my book. I think every writer imagines what this must feel like—that lure of what appears to be celebrity or at least a type of acknowledgement of success. To hold your own book in your hands, and even better, to have someone who cares enough to ask for your autograph. Heaven.

But in the fantasy of book tour, no time is given to thoughts of the difficulty of living on the road, of touring for the new book while the next book is due at the publisher, of being in strange cities where directions can be challenging, or for the endless complications of finding a house-sitter to care for livestock and critters in varying stages of decrepitude.

Yet I am doing my best to cover as much of my home “territory” as I can this year. Part of it is the booksellers. I mean, I became a writer because I love to read. And bookstores were havens—still are. The idea of spending a couple of hours talking about books and writers and the happenings of an industry which is very small with someone who loves and reads books—what could be better? Not much.

Over the years, these booksellers have become friends, and the tour is the time when I get to visit and catch up with new family members, great debut novels I haven’t heard about, or the news of old friends who are doing well.

The stores I sign at most often are independents, meaning they’re not part of a larger chain. Locally owned and operated, these stores remind me of my childhood hang-out, the Haunted Bookstore in Mobile, Alabama. I grew up across the state line in Lucedale, Mississippi, which had no bookstore. So my mother would drive me to Mobile so that I could spend my carefully hoarded allowance on books.

I didn’t know the woman who owned the bookstore personally, but she knew me. She knew my love of horses and mysteries, and when I stepped inside, more often than not she’d reach beneath the counter and bring out a book.

“I think this may be for you,” she’d say as she handed me a book.

And for a few minutes, I’d examine it, feeling the weight of it in my hand, the texture of the paper beneath my fingers, and the smell of it, that new book smell that somehow, mysteriously, includes adventure, excitement, and entree into a totally different world.

Without fail, this would be a perfect book for me. I would buy it and begin reading as soon as I got home.

This book tour will take me back to stores where I signed in 1994 with my first novel, SUMMER OF THE REDEEMERS. A bond has formed between these booksellers and me. While I’ve worked hard to build a reading audience, many of these stores have struggled to stay open. In fourteen years, the world of publishing has changed greatly. Yet we are still working, still doing the thing we love best of all.


This annual pilgrimage, while difficult to manage, allows me yet again to visit stores that bring me directly back to my initial love of books. And it will also give me a chance to visit with friends, old and new, and readers who surprise and delight me with stories, pink boas, or just a smile. We might not know each other, but we are never strangers. We share a love of books.

I was first a reader. I’m still a reader. I hope that people who enjoy my books will come and talk with me, for I will be in the one place where I am forever at home. Among the books.

Carolyn Haines’s mysteries, HALLOWED BONES and PENUMBRA, have been selected as one of the top five mysteries of their respective years (2004 and 2006) by LIBRARY JOURNAL. She is the recipient of an Alabama State Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship, and she teaches creative writing at the University of South Alabama. Check out her book tour at wwww.carolynhaines.com

Houdini's Got Nothing On Me

Poof!

I vanish, just like that.

There are occasionally warnings, the carefully worded auto-reply, the ever-shortened phone call. But usually I am simply…gone. It is not a good trait in a friend, is it? There are no more lunches, no more long e-mails, and rarely an explanation.

I would irritate the hell out of myself.

But I don't stop.

Because I am writing.

And I am far enough into it that I won't be stopping anytime soon.

And I am not far enough into it to make me comfortable that I will meet my own, self-imposed, utterly ridiculous and unattainable deadline.

I am in that past-33,000-but-not-yet-at-78,000 part that is my most dreaded, the section in which I think it's a book but it could just be an extraordinary waste of time.

And though my friends think they want me to go to lunch or think they want to have a conversation with me, they are wrong. Nobody would really want to be around me at this point. Because I have disappeared. I will not listen to anything that they have to say, despite the fact that I will try, very hard, to concentrate on them, their problems and joys and jokes and secrets.

Instead, they will become frustrated with me because my eyes will begin to grow unfocused, and they will ask a question, to test me, to see if I am listening, and I will fail the test, I won't answer, except to nod and smile and agree with something I've never even heard.

When I beg off on an invitation accepted gladly at any other time, I will say "I'm not good company right now," and they will laugh and they won't believe me, and they will say things like "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just lunch, come on, you need to get out, we can talk if you want, or we don't even have to talk at all," and they believe this will be okay with them, because they are good friends, and good people, and they support me.

But they don't really believe that I will remain in another world while I am with them. That, if I answer at all when they ask, "What do you think?" after they've told me a fairly simple story about their son's run-in with the baseball coach, I will not be able to say, "I think it's time for you and Dan to get involved. Look, he's only fifteen, and this sort of thing is probably a little beyond him at this point. Don't think of it as being over-protective, think of it as teaching him how to handle this sort of situation in the future," because that answer would have required me to be paying attention.

No, I will likely say something like "Oh, uhhhh, I just figured out that she can't say anything yet because she's going to need someone at the beach anyway, and besides, the turtle won't eat" which will, of course, make no sense and will prove, beyond a doubt, that I've not heard a single word they've said.

And they will not think that I am a bad friend because I don't feel like I can leave the house right now, right in the middle of writing this book, which might be irritating, but is not, after all, a personal insult.

No, they will think that I am a bad friend because I am not interested in them and can't be bothered to listen to their problems for even an hour, and they will grow angry with me and eventually our friendship will end because, really, that is rather personal, isn't it?

And so I have to disappear.

Because I am a good friend. And I do care, and when I am on, I am truly on, I am there, their problems are my problems, and I am involved and suffer with them and celebrate with them and love them and the people they love with a ferocity that would likely surprise them were they able to see inside of my soul.

And I care enough about them to know when I can't be that person for them, 100% involved and listening. It is all I can do to remember to shower during these times.

I can no longer make long convoluted apologies for my disappearing acts.

I am aware that every year I will lose a friend or two over it, and there are times that I want to point out that I have stayed with them when they disappeared, when they attended to boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, children, pets, elective surgery, depressions, vacations, housecleaning, hair drying, manicures, pedicures, massages, errands, and I want to break down the percentage of my attention to them vs. their attention to me and show a pie chart that proves that in the big, Who's The Better Friend competition, we are pretty equal after all.

I put up with a lot from my friends. Because I love them, and I know that I share them with the universe.

And I hope they know that if they need me, really need me, I will appear out of nowhere, and will be by their side, as I always have been, as I always will be.

All I ask in return is to, when I disappear, let me.

And love me when I come back.

Poof!

Kristy Kiernan is the author of Catching Genius (March 2007) and Matters of Faith (August 2008). Her most recent review for Matters of Faith comes from Publishers Weekly and goes a little something like this:

"In this tense, well-paced novel about belief, Kiernan explores what happens when faith and love test the limits of family fealty. In southwest Florida, college student Marshall Tobias is in search of something to believe in. He thinks he’s found God and the woman he’s always dreamed of when he falls in love with fundamentalist believer Ada Sparks. But Ada’s against medical intervention for illness, and tragedy results when she sets out to “help” Marshall’s 12-year-old sister, Meghan, overcome her life-threatening allergies.

Switching points-of-view between Marshall and his mother, Chloe, Kiernan (Catching Genius) movingly portrays a 20-year-old marriage gone flat and torn apart by crisis, a troubled son, a daughter hovering between life and death, and the hard-to-discern boundaries between true faith and unhealthy fanaticism. She handles her difficult material respectfully.

Most interesting is her portrayal of the well-meaning traps parents fall into when encouraging open-ended exploration of faith without context, or choosing to remain silent. The thoughtful themes, interesting characters and page-turning drama of this novel will likely make it a book club favorite."

—Publishers Weekly

Writer as Reporter: If You’re Scared, It May be True

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Gene Roberts speak at the annual dinner of the UNC Greensboro Friends of the Library. Roberts is co-author of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, for which he won the Pulitzer in 2006. Roberts has been a reporter since he started out covering the cattle sales in Wayne County, NC. He worked for the News & Observer in Durham, and went on to be a journalist and editor for the New York Times and the Philadelphia Enquirer, the latter of which garnered more than a dozen Pulitzers during his tenure.

Hearing Roberts speak in Greensboro had special significance. Not only because he was coming back close to home turf, but because Greensboro, like many southern cities, has its own claim to the civil rights struggle—like it or not. For us, the defining moment was the Woolworth’s sit-in, which took place 47 years ago and is still part of our living history. Folks of a certain age who pass each other on Elm Street, where Woolworth’s was and where our long-awaited civil rights museum will one day be, can nod politely and remember how very different this familiar landscape used to be, depending on the color of your skin.

I went to Woolworth’s a few days before it closed in the fall of 1993. The lady who served me coffee had been there working while the sit-ins occurred. I was a year or so away from taking a job at a non-profit, where the son of one of the four men who conducted the sit-ins (with the help and support of many other men and women students, notably the women of the historically black Bennett College and the white students of the Woman’s College, now UNCG) was one of the board members.

Roberts told a story of how he got help hoisting himself onto the sill of a high open window to hear Martin Luther King speak is a church in Durham around the time of the sit-ins.

He also told about watching a girl desegregate a high school in some other southern town. It had been decided that she should come to school after the start of the day, so that all the students would already be in their classrooms. It was thought that this would be less disruptive. Roberts watched with other reporters as the girl’s parents drove her to the corner in front of the school. She got out of the car and walked toward the entrance. Then, he said, she stopped, and began shaking all over—he and the other reporters could see this from the other side of the street. The moment stretched on, and they weren’t sure if she would be able to keep going. Then she straightened up, put her shoulders back, gathered herself, and walked inside.

Can you imagine being that girl?

Can you imagine being her parents, delivering her, and watching her walk away?

People say it takes courage to write the truth, and I believe that. But I can’t think of anything much more frightening than walking into a place where no one wants me. To walk past—and through—that fear. Then again, if your writing scares you that much, you may be onto something.

Quinn Dalton is the author of a novel, High Strung, and two story collections, Bulletproof Girl and Stories from the Afterlife. Stories and essays have appeared in literary magazines such as One Story, Verb and Glimmer Train, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. Dalton lives in Greensboro, NC.