Welcome. Please tell us a little about yourself.
For two decades I’ve lived outside of Cooperstown, New York, in northern Appalachia, but I grew up in the foothills of southern Appalachia. In the western Piedmont of North Carolina. It was a world of cotton mills and cinder-block churches. That’s still the place I write about.
As a fiction writer, probably the single most important biographical detail is that I spent the years of puberty convinced I would burn in hell for all of eternity. I believed that. Burn and boil and fry—alone. Moreover, I had a Sunday School teacher who spoke passionately and persistently of the Rapture, and thus I was certain that my damnation might begin unexpectedly at any moment. So, I’ve known insanity.
As an adult, I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a life that has been stable and cheerful and generally optimistic, but deep in my brain I’m sure there persists this little almond of terror and self-recrimination. I’m tempted toward gothic modes and drawn to characters who are wrestling with varying degrees of abjectness. My goal is to dig down into that darkness with them and help them grope their way toward some light.
