Blog Archives
A Casting Gold Mine
Two Street delivers twelve gritty, darkly funny short stories populated by small-time criminals, frustrated nurses, struggling families, and neighborhood characters who have mastered the art of hiding heartbreak behind a well-timed insult. What inspired you to bring these twelve stories together, and what connects them in your mind?
I live in the Pennsport section of South Philadelphia, working-class on the waterfront. My neighbors are teamsters and stevedores, cops and contractors. Solid citizens all, along with semi-solid. We like our Phillies, and we like our Flyers, and we host the oldest New Year’s Day parade in the country, right down Two Street. What connects these stories is the city life, the close proximity, the shoulder-to-shoulder that connects and binds us. Or not. For a writer auditioning characters, the inner city is a casting gold mine.
What makes South Philadelphia such a rich setting for storytelling, particularly when it comes to its personalities, traditions, and sense of community?
South Philly has the Mummers and the Mafia. Couldn’t get more colorful than that. But a city with a strong working class will instill a deeper social awareness and collective identity in the people who live there. I know this to be true. The thing about Pennsport, you can’t live there and not schmooze the neighbors. It’s just not possible.
Your dialogue often features sharp exchanges, interruptions, and characters trying to outtalk one another. How did you develop your ear for these conversational rhythms?
Like most cities, South Philly has its own way of talking. As accents go, ours is not so easily identified. You just know it’s not from where you live. I’ve always loved dialogue, and there’s no accent more conducive to clever banter than Philly’s.
How did you choose the title Two Street, and what does it represent about the neighborhood and the stories within the collection?
Second Street in South Philly has long been called Two Street. The reference came with the establishment of numerous Mummers’ clubhouses along Second Street in the 1900’s.
Author Links: GoodReads
hard luck laments and desperate measures. They say write what you know and that’s what I know.
TWO STREET TOM LARSEN
Tom Larsen lives in the Pennsport section of South Philadelphia, home to Mummers, Flyers and that “screw you” slant that made this city great. For a writer auditioning characters, the 19148 zip is a casting gold mine. Tom worked as a journeyman pressman for thirty years before scrapping it all for the writer’s life. His work has appeared in Raritan, The Los Angeles Review, Philadelphia Stories Magazine, New Millennium Writing and Best American Mystery Stories.
Flawed and Human
The Fall is an unsettling psychological story following one night in the life of a man battling opioid addiction, withdrawal, and the lasting wounds of childhood trauma. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
This story came from necessity. In the Terms Series, readers see Sebastian’s overdose from the outside and watch him fight his way toward recovery. What they never saw was the night from inside his head. Showing him at his worst gives readers a fuller sense of how far he travels across the series.
It’s also personal. I’ve watched loved ones struggle with addiction, and I know the toll it takes. The disease twists someone’s personality and morals during their hardest moments. My goal was to explore the difference between who Sebastian is beneath his addiction, how the disease changes his behavior, and the pain that led him there. I kept it to a single night on purpose. Addiction shrinks a person’s whole world down to the next fix, and I wanted readers to feel the suffocation Sebastian felt that night.
The hallucinations give the story an almost horror-like quality. Did you consciously draw on horror conventions?
No, actually. When I sent the first draft to my beta readers, many of whom had firsthand experience, they told me to push the hallucinations further. They shared their own specific experiences of drug-induced psychosis for me to draw from as I shaped the story, and that changed the book. If it reads like horror, it’s because that’s how they told me it felt.
The structure came from the same place. The fragmented sentences, the repetition, and the abrupt jumps between memory and the present mirror how Sebastian’s mind works in withdrawal. His thoughts loop, his past keeps intruding, and he can’t always tell what’s real. Then, as the high takes hold, his mind warms, and the sentences grow longer and more fluid to carry that shift. I wanted readers to feel trapped in that cycle the way he is.
What do you hope readers feel toward Sebastian, even when his behavior is difficult to accept?
That’s a hard question. When I set out to write the Holt Universe, my goal was to tell stories, not to interpret them for the people who read them. Everyone who picks up The Fall arrives from a different headspace, with different lives and different experiences, and all of that shapes how they read it. Someone who has loved a person through addiction may see Sebastian very differently from someone who hasn’t, and both readings are valid. So, I guess, I don’t have a hope for how readers feel about him. That part belongs to them.
What I can say is that I didn’t write him to be excused or condemned. I don’t sanitize hard material or soften it to hold a reader’s hand. I wrote him to be honest: cruel and frightened, selfish and lonely, all at once. Flawed and human, just like the rest of us.
Is there another character in the Holt Universe whose story you are especially eager to explore?
Absolutely! I’m especially eager to explore Rosie, the matriarch of the Holt family, and Ava, a sleeper character in the Terms Series with a much bigger role to play than readers realize.
Their stories intertwine, and that’s what excites me most about the Holt Universe. At its heart, it’s a multigenerational family saga, stretching from Rosie’s youth to her grandchildren and beyond. What one generation lives through shapes the next, and I want to explore those lives through the eyes of the people who lived them.
The stories often overlap in time, meaning two characters can live through the same moment and walk away with completely different truths, shaped by their own histories, experiences, and biases, much like readers do.
That’s also why I love the idea of rereading these books. On a first read, you might question a character’s motives or finish with unanswered questions. But people aren’t omniscient, and neither are my characters, my readers, or even me. Each book reveals another piece of the larger picture, changing how you understand everything that came before it.
Rosie and Ava are where that really begins. Trinity, releasing January 30, 2027, follows Rosie’s journey to becoming the woman readers know from the Terms Series. Running alongside it is Ava’s Golden Trilogy, beginning with Shattered, which explores those same years from her perspective. Readers will encounter the same events and the same people, but through two very different sets of eyes.
And that’s the part I can’t wait for readers to discover. Neither woman has the whole story, but together, they offer readers a perspective neither could provide alone.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Shut up.
Shut the f—
I fisted my hair, pulling at the strands.
Everything hurt.
Sick.
I was getting—
One night.
A man in withdrawal, chasing a fix across the city.
It ends on a balcony.
The Fall is Sebastian Holt’s story, an experimental 5,300 word literary short story. There is no love interest, no HEA, and no relief. It is a single night inside a single mind, told from the point of view of a man in active opioid addiction, and it does not look away.
This story isn’t written to be enjoyed. It’s meant to be endured.
No prior Holt Universe knowledge required. The Fall runs alongside the final days of Terms of Surrender, Book 1 of the Terms series. Readers who have not read Terms of Surrender should know that this story reveals how that book ends.
Content warnings are listed in full at the front of the book, with a more detailed version on Nicole Gregory’s website. Please read them.
The Fall
Nicole Gregory’s The Fall is a raw and unsettling work of psychological literary fiction that takes readers inside the mind of Sebastian Holt, a man caught in the relentless grip of opioid addiction. Set over the course of a single night, this experimental short story explores the physical torment of withdrawal, the psychological damage of childhood trauma, and the crushing weight of shame. Sebastian’s world has narrowed to a desperate search for his next fix, with every thought and interaction filtered through his deteriorating mental state. As part of the Holt Universe, the story offers a revealing look at Sebastian before recovery, while also standing on its own as a piece of dark literary fiction. Gregory establishes an atmosphere of desperation almost immediately, pulling readers into a consciousness where memories, hallucinations, and present-day experiences constantly collide.
Gregory uses fragmented sentences, repetition, abrupt transitions, and a stream-of-consciousness approach to capture Sebastian’s increasingly unstable thoughts. His physical pain becomes almost tangible as certain phrases return throughout the story, mimicking the obsessive cycles of addiction and withdrawal. The writing creates a claustrophobic experience, making even ordinary interactions feel threatening or overwhelming. Sebastian’s hallucinations are particularly effective, gradually blurring the boundaries between what he’s experiencing and what his mind is manufacturing. These moments give the psychological fiction elements an almost horror-like intensity. The pacing is equally deliberate, with brief chapters and sharp shifts in thought reflecting Sebastian’s inability to maintain control over his own perceptions. Gregory’s prose is visceral and emotionally charged, immersing readers in a perspective shaped by fear, physical suffering, and years of unresolved trauma.
Sebastian himself is a complicated and often uncomfortable character to follow. His thoughts about other people can be cruel, degrading, and selfish, yet his internal narration also reveals profound loneliness, guilt, and self-loathing. His relationship with Rebecca exposes the destructive dynamics that can emerge when two people are struggling with addiction, especially when their circumstances leave them vulnerable to exploitation. Meanwhile, memories of Sebastian’s family, particularly his brother Damien and their violent childhood, add important emotional depth. These glimpses into his past reveal how deeply fear and shame have influenced his sense of identity. One of the story’s most compelling themes is Sebastian’s belief that he’s a coward, a conviction that colors his memories and shapes his behavior. Gregory connects childhood trauma with present-day addiction through recurring images, sounds, and sensations, allowing readers to experience how the past continues to intrude on Sebastian’s life. There’s an especially painful contrast between the person he believes himself to be and the moments when his capacity for empathy briefly surfaces.
The Fall is an intense exploration of addiction, trauma, and the fragile relationship between memory and identity. Its combination of psychological realism and experimental literary fiction makes it a particularly immersive reading experience, even as its subject matter grows increasingly distressing. Gregory approaches addiction through the lived sensations of someone experiencing it, emphasizing the exhaustion, desperation, distorted thinking, and emotional isolation that accompany the disease. The story also confronts sexual exploitation, domestic violence, and the lasting consequences of abuse, making its content warnings worth taking seriously. What stayed with me most was the way Sebastian’s internal voice shifts between anger, denial, fear, and fleeting moments of clarity. Those contradictions give his character a deeply human complexity and make his struggles difficult to dismiss. Readers who appreciate dark psychological fiction, character-driven literary fiction, and emotionally demanding stories about addiction will find plenty to examine here. The Fall is a haunting portrait of a man consumed by his circumstances, with a narrative voice that lingers long after the final page.
Pages: 53 | ASIN : B0HBJGGNX5
Two Street
Tom Larsen’s Two Street is a collection of twelve short stories about people who’ve accumulated enough disappointments to have an opinion about everything. South Philadelphia supplies much of its atmosphere: row houses, corner bars, hospital corridors, neighborhood gossip, and the particular misery of following the Phillies. Even when the stories travel farther afield, they carry that close attention to how people size each other up. Larsen’s characters include small-time crooks, nurses, struggling husbands, and adults still trying to make sense of their parents. They’re quick with an insult and slower to admit what hurts. Spending time with them feels like sitting at a kitchen table where the conversation keeps getting funnier, more personal, and a little harder to leave. The collection’s appeal begins with those voices and grows through the lives they reveal.
Larsen has an especially good ear for the way a conversation can become a contest. His dialogue is full of interruptions, evasions, affectionate needling, and people insisting they’ve got things under control. In “Lids,” a burglar’s absorption in jigsaw puzzles gives his private life an unexpected texture, while encounters with his neighbors bring competing desires into focus. In “Psyched,” a nurse’s exchanges with hospital administrators turn workplace frustration into sharp, unruly comedy. The humor depends on timing and character: a pompous explanation, a perfectly placed comeback, the moment someone’s confidence gets ahead of their sense. There’s pleasure in the details, too. Furniture, cigarettes, television programs, meals, and cars tell us how these people live and what they imagine a better life might look like. A room can expose someone as clearly as an argument.
Beneath all that talk, the collection keeps returning to questions of care and responsibility. What do we owe an old friend, an estranged relative, a vulnerable animal, or the person we used to be? “Tracer” approaches those questions through an unemployed man’s concern for a stray dog. “Stickman” brings them into a kitchen where a visitor’s troubles test the limits of friendship and help. Across the book, Larsen pays attention to the awkward business of caring for someone while feeling frustrated, frightened, or overwhelmed by them. His animal stories extend that interest into hunger, habit, dependence, and the struggle to survive. The emotional force comes from recognizable behavior: offering food, making a phone call, remembering a kindness, finding an excuse to stay a little longer. Affection here often arrives with a complaint attached, which makes it feel convincingly lived.
The stories vary in scale, from tightly contained encounters to accounts that gather years of choices and consequences. That range gives the collection room for both comic momentum and quieter reflection. Its language is coarse and lively, its observations frequently cutting, and its people capable of remarkable self-deception. Larsen lets their charm and their failures occupy the same space. He’s particularly persuasive about aging, when the future starts to feel smaller and familiar places become reminders of everything that’s changed. You can enjoy these stories for their banter and crooked schemes, but their staying power comes from the vulnerability running through them. By the end, you’ve spent time with people whose jokes have become a way of carrying what they can’t easily confess. Two Street makes you laugh, then lets you feel what the laughter costs.
Pages: 149 | ASIN : B0DL9TYXX1
Violations of Natural Order
Eros and Order: Love That Creates and Destroys explores the fragile boundary between love and control through literary stories of marriage, obsession, rescue, crime, immigration, and moral consequence. What drew you to the idea of examining love as a creative and destructive force?
Actually, the only story written specifically for this collection is “No Good Deed.” All the others had their independent inspirations, with three of them—“Perfect Girl,” “I Am Zico,” and “The Story of Aunt Jenny”—being derived from actual events. The unity of the collection occurred to me later as I began to assemble the collection from stories I had previously written. Then, finally seeing that the unity of the stories consisted of love’s changeable nature, I wrote “No Good Deed” as a commentary on that theme. The story’s character, Nora, has experienced a lack of normal parental love and, to compensate, has retreated from life into a Gothic cult. She has become so distrustful of what most of us regard as normal life—and love—that she hesitates to recognize it, let alone accept it, when it materializes in the character Ronnie, who is attempting to save her from herself.
The title story has a strong classical sensibility, with ideas of vows, order, betrayal, and consequence. How did classical themes influence the collection?
The ancient Greeks had a keen sense of order, which we shared in a Christianized version from the Middle Ages until it was shattered by the horrors of World War I. The Greeks also recognized that erotic love could, if allowed, challenge and even destroy that order in individuals, even if done unintentionally. Consider the myth of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, without recognizing their true identities. Nevertheless, a plague descends on Thebes, the city Oedipus rules. And to lift that plague, the double sins that Oedipus has committed must be expiated, which he accomplishes by blinding himself.
Collectively, the stories in Eros and Order deal with violations of natural order: a woman who deserts her husband and young children in the title story, a father who imposes unnatural restrictions on his daughter in “Perfect Girl,” a girl who grows up without parental love in “No Good Deed.” Once the natural order is broken, it must be restored. The fact that the rebalancing does not occur immediately may deceive us into believing that we can escape it, but just as Sandra Patterson eventually learns in “Eros and Order,” we cannot.
A wonderful source for studying the evolutionary history of love in Western culture is C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (1936).
Several stories explore the danger of confusing love with ownership, rescue, or control. Was there a particular moral question you wanted readers to wrestle with?
Yes, just what constitutes a beneficial, healthy relationship that we can recognize as love? The answer waits at the end of the collection in “The Story of Aunt Jenny,” a folktale about the Underground Railroad in the Mid-Ohio Valley of what became the state of West Virginia. Aunt Jenny risks her own freedom to help other escaped slaves, for West Virginia was still part of Virginia and therefore the Confederacy during most of her lifetime. Her actions are in sharp contrast to those of Sandra Patterson in the story that opens the collection. Sandra seeks complete personal freedom and so abandons her responsibilities to her husband and children. Aunt Jenny risks her personal freedom to help others achieve it.
Ruggiero Bellafatezza, the crime boss father of Serena in “Perfect Girl,” very well illustrates the dangers of attempting to control others as he imposes unnatural restrictions on his daughter’s romantic life for the benefit of his criminal activity by pledging her in marriage to his underboss, Ricky Lanza. Serena rebels by having a different beau for each day of the week in order to flaunt her independence until tragedy results.
“No Good Deed” offers hope while still questioning whether love can truly save someone. What do you think love can realistically offer people in moments of despair?
Well, if nothing else, the collection shows that love has a variable and elusive character, but it can be decisive in saving someone. In “No Good Deed,” Ronnie attempts to do just that for Nora, whom he has just met, despite warnings from his coworkers and quite strongly from Nora herself that he shouldn’t. But he emphasizes to her that to lift herself out of a life that at times has involved homelessness, she must create a change in herself; he can only help her do that. Thus, at the story’s resolution, Nora must decide whether she will try to change, with Ronnie’s help, or remain in her adopted family—a Goth tribal cult. Thus, for love to succeed, it must involve a commitment by both participants.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
A teen fashion model who plots revenge against her father for the murder of her lover.
A Detroit factory worker who falls for a Goth girl who warns him not to.
A Moroccan immigrant who dies in the tough streets of Napoli.
A married couple mired in a Babel of their own making.
A folktale about a heroic woman and the Underground Railroad in West Virginia.
The Mystery of Connection
Prima Nocta explores soul connections and relationships by way of interconnected stories presented from various perspectives and within different historical settings. Where did the idea for this unique novel come from?
It grew from questions I couldn’t quite let go of: how we misunderstand each other, how connection forms, and why certain relationships feel inevitable. And… what defines a soul? I was particularly drawn to the idea of “fated” connections, but not confined to a single lifetime. Using the concept of samsara (the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth), I imagined the same two souls meeting again and again across centuries, each time shaped by different circumstances, yet drawn together by something deeper.
Structurally, I wanted to explore that idea through multiple historical settings: grounded pasts, recognizable presents, and speculative futures. Examining how perspective shifts radically between two people experiencing the same moment. The result became a kind of metaphysical echo: the same connection, refracted through time, culture, and identity.
What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?
Interesting? More like fascinating!
What fascinates me most is how subjective experience is.
Two people can live through the same moment and walk away with entirely different truths. The tension between shared reality and individual perception is where I find the most compelling stories.
I’m also drawn to the mystery of connection: that instinctive sense of recognition we sometimes feel with a stranger. It defies logic, yet feels undeniable. Even in something as structured as dating, we often know within minutes whether a connection will mature or fade. That raises a deeper question: what, exactly, are we responding to?
There was a lot of time spent crafting the character traits in this novel. What was the most important factor for you to get right in your characters?
Voice was everything.
Each character needed to feel fully inhabited: distinct not only in personality, but in language, rhythm, and worldview. Language shapes perception, so their diction had to reflect their time, culture, and internal life. Dominique, for example, would never use a word like “guillotine” (it hadn’t been invented yet).
It also had to reflect who they were as a person. To write them honestly, I couldn’t remain at a distance. I had to step into each character’s experience and live it as fully as I could.
And, truthfully, many of those moments stayed with me. I found myself emotionally affected while writing them. Even found myself in a few restless nights, concerned for a character even though I fully knew what would happen to them.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Yes! Another novel set in the Prima Nocta universe is currently in beta review. While it connects to the first book, it stands entirely on its own.
It follows Dominique, one of the central figures, as he takes on a lifelong journey across medieval Europe and Asia, ultimately arriving at a Tantric ashram in the Himalayas. It’s a ‘bildungsroman’ in the truest sense: a story of both physical and spiritual transformation. The people who guide him along the way, especially two amazing women who shape his spiritual journey, are also central to the plot.
Where Prima Nocta explores connection across lifetimes, this next work explores what it means to seek understanding within a single life… and what must be surrendered to achieve it.
And yes, there’s more beyond that. Another book is in development, and a fantasy trilogy is beginning to take shape.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
What if your soulmate existed — again and again — across centuries, worlds, and lifetimes, but each time, something went wrong?
Prima Nocta is an emotionally rich novel that explores love at its deepest level — beyond time, beyond reason, and beyond the body.
Told through twelve sensual, interconnected stories that span from medieval France to a fractured but hopeful future, this book invites you into the lives of six couples:A hunted scholar and a witch who sees his soul.
A grieving Japanese lord and a geisha who knows too much.
A serf’s daughter haunted by dreams, and the Duke who shares them.
A gangster, a trollop, a writer, a physicist… and the threads that bind them all.
Through reincarnation, mysticism, quantum theory, and raw human longing, these lovers must discover not just each other, but also the truth behind reality itself.
This novel is deep, lyrical storytelling about:Fated soulmates
Sacred sexuality
Emotional and spiritual healing
Metaphysical mystery
What early readers are saying:“A celebration of human connection that left me in happy tears.”
“Sensual, intelligent, and unforgettable.”
“Imagine if Cloud Atlas and The Time Traveler’s Wife had a love child — this would be it.”
For readers who love:Deep love stories with spiritual and metaphysical undercurrents (and spicy moments)
Stories that challenge the essence of love, connection, memory, destiny, and time
Mature content advisory: Contains emotionally intense adult themes and explicit sensuality.
Learn more at: https://djprattauthor.com
Connie’s White World
Connie’s White World is a debut short story collection by Sam Newsome, saxophonist, educator, and what you might call a jazz anthropologist of the human condition. The book gathers ten interlocking stories set in the world of jazz: a white pianist rattled by a racially charged review, a beautiful but undisciplined busker haunted by ambition he never quite answers, a classically trained soprano who sheds her mother’s legacy for a sequined alter ego at a Chinatown dive bar, an aging educator whose memory dissolves even as the music remains, a saxophonist who stops playing after an accident that kills a girl. These characters live at the margins of recognition, talented, conflicted, sometimes sabotaged by their own psychologies, and Newsome traces the grain of their private lives with the attentiveness of someone who has spent decades listening. As he explains in his liner notes, he rewrote these stories as jazz: short clauses, Baldwin-style em dashes, rhythmic disruptions. The prose swings because it was designed to.
What I liked most was Newsome’s refusal to adjudicate. He gives every voice its weight, even the uncomfortable ones. The opening story, “Connie’s White World,” places us inside a white jazz pianist grappling with a career-defining accusation that her music has “strained out Black culture,” and Newsome neither exonerates her nor condemns her. She is by turns defensive, self-aware, and achingly honest about her own limitations, and the story’s power comes precisely from that honesty. “Letter to the Editor” operates as a bracketed epistolary duel between a Black saxophonist and a white critic, and Newsome lets both men reveal themselves through escalating salvos until neither is fully right and neither is fully clean. The book is most alive when it refuses easy resolution. “The Legacy of Mr. Mosley” is perhaps its finest achievement, a portrait of a jazz educator undone by dementia, cared for by a son-in-law who can’t bring himself to call him “Dad,” still tapping two and four in wingtips on a nursing home deck while Chet Baker drifts from the speakers.
Some stories, particularly “Tone-Hole Love,” narrated from a saxophone’s perspective, feel more like impressionistic experiments, and a few of the romantic subplots arrive and depart quickly. The prose occasionally tips from rhythmic restraint into something closer to purple heat, especially in scenes of physical intimacy.
Readers drawn to literary fiction, jazz fiction, and character-driven short story collections will find much to admire here, particularly those who have appreciated James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for its portrait of music and community, or Colson Whitehead’s early work for its cool, socially observant prose. Newsome writes from inside the jazz world in a way most fiction doesn’t; his characters argue about voicings and sidemen with the specificity of people for whom these things are genuinely at stake. Connie’s White World is an unmistakably alive debut, proof that when a musician decides to write, the silence between the notes can carry as much meaning as the notes themselves.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0GJN1117N
Oral Histories
Coal Dust on Purple Asters is a trilogy of short fiction centered around the hardship and hope found in the coal country of rural Kentucky. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My mother grew up as a coal miner’s daughter in Knott County, Kentucky, during the 1930s and 40s. While her family’s reality was often defined by hardship and poverty, my grandmother’s stories also sparkled with the resilience of people who found dignity and contentment despite those struggles. As a writer, I felt a natural pull toward those memories. While the stories in this collection are fictionalized, there is a deep kernel of truth in each one that honors my family’s history.
Coal is both a livelihood and a threat throughout the book. What conversations or research influenced how you portrayed the tension between pride in mining and its human cost?
It is a profound contrast. In the 1920s and 30s, the mines were treacherous — thick with dust and the constant threat of roof collapses. Yet, for many, the mines offered a “decent” living that farming or blacksmithing simply couldn’t provide. There is a specific kind of pride in doing a dangerous, difficult job well, and the men who entered those tunnels with pickaxes felt that deeply. My portrayal of this tension was heavily influenced by the oral histories passed down through my mother’s family, capturing both the physical toll on the land and the quiet pride of the workers.
Despite loss and hardship, the book keeps returning to hope. How do you balance darkness and grace in your storytelling?
I believe the human spirit naturally gravitates toward the light. The mining families of that era faced immense obstacles, but they didn’t face them in isolation; they lived in tight-knit, fiercely supportive communities. By focusing on that communal strength, the “grace” emerges naturally. It’s about showing how people cling to one another in the dark, how the sun still manages to break through a cloud of coal dust.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I enjoyed the short story format so much that I am currently completing another trilogy of fiction. This new project remains in the same time period but shifts the setting to the farmlands of Northeast Tennessee. There isn’t a firm release date yet, but I’ll share more updates soon!
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
In “Rain on Chinquapin Holler,” Wiley Hicks’ heart is torn between his mountain-bred wife and a perfumed city woman who represents everything he both desires and despises. Meanwhile, bootleg whiskey offers both escape and enslavement. A devastating flood forces impossible choices that leave no one unscathed.
“A Sprig of Purple Asters” follows May Owens, whose unemployed miner husband vacillates between pride and despair while their sons’ bellies grow hollow. When her opportunistic brothers arrive, May’s desperate gamble saves her family by nearly destroying it.
The final story — “Red Snow in the Kentucky Woods” — follows young James Herald Gibson who, after losing his father and brother to a mine collapse, vows never to descend below ground himself, whatever the cost. His choice spirals into a decades-long mystery of family secrets and unbearable guilt.
Throughout, characters speak in the lilting cadence of mountainfolk whose poetic speech preserves the rhythms and phrases of their Elizabethan ancestors.
