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Genre: Literary Fiction
About memphisminnieLocation: Northwest Arkansas Home Region: Favorite novels: Invisible Man, Beloved, Sula, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, The Outsider, Maus, Love Medicine, Middle Passage, Favorite writers: Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway Favorite music: Blues--Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Big Bill Broonzie, Bessie Smith, and Memphis Minnie, of course! Non-noveling interests: Bass fishing, playing frisbee with my dog, reading great books, watching baseball |
Joined: octobre 12, 2008 This Year: Official Participant NaNoWriMo History: NaNoWriMo posts: 0 NaNoWriMo buddies: 5
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Brief Author Bio: I'm a literature professor. It's a great gig, for I get paid to read and talk about the best books in the world. (Actually, as an Americanist, I typically just talk about the best books written in America.) Although I love writing and write creatively as often as possible, I have never before written a novel. I typically write short stories and flash fiction, so I'm modeling my novel on those novels that are held together by a series of short stories--Tim O'Brien's _The Things They Carried_, Louise Erdrich's _Love Medicine_, Sherwood Anderson's _Winesburg, Ohio_, and Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, especially. This may make me a giant loser in the novel-writing world, but I just can't seem to sustain a single protagonist and central story long enough to write a traditional novel. Perhaps NaNoWriMo will give me the experience and endurance needed to write a traditional novel , but I thought I should start with baby steps this first time out. |
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Synopsis: Not a Drop to Drink
Written as a series of fictional arcs, overlapping short stories, this novel chronicles the town of Harperville and its many colorful characters through the perspective of a disgruntled but highly successful prostitute. In my opening chapter, from which the excerpt is taken, the narrator addesses the "sweet wives" of Harperville.
Excerpt: Not a Drop to Drink
Once upon a time, when I was a wife, I worried about many of the same things that you worry about, things that made me less than keen to dance around in a thong and high-heels. I worried about my small breasts and cottage cheese thighs and the effects of gravity on my ass. I worried about looking foolish. Most of all, I worried that my husband would take one look and regret lashing his horse to my wagon. These worries, sweet wives, drove me to taper off sex with my husband, and then to ban it all together. These worries eventually drove my husband into one of your beds, though I still don’t know which one. He’s long gone now, and some of you don’t even remember that I was once a sweet wife of Harperville, baking my famous blondies and mint brownies for the church bake sale. You know me as the town whore now, but many of you surely recall that I was once the most popular teacher at Harperville Elementary. (I never told you this before, sweet wives, but most of your children are as thick as Mrs. Taggert’s bread pudding.)
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