This quote from Welty sums up why I write. Beginning at age five, I went to school with my sister, Betty (because we couldn’t afford kindergarten) and Mrs. Mary Louise DuBignon Clark allowed me to “audit” her fifth grade classroom at Hazard Laboratory School in Albany, Georgia. I sat in the back and told stories by drawing pictures, complete with yellow snow because I had not yet seen (did not know about) real snow, and white Crayola has no expression on white paper. As soon as I started school and could string together enough words to make paragraphs I became a writer: asking and trying to answer questions about my world. Mrs. Clark would become my fifth grad teacher as well and helped inspire imagination in all of us in her class.
That journey led me to the query process for my debut novel, Peach Seed Monkey (now titled The Peach Seed), set in 2012 Southwest Georgia with flashbacks to the 1960s. The manuscript was selected as a Finalist in the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and will be published in summer 2023 by Henry Holt & Company.