Each of my stories has a provenance of sorts, an origin in people and places I've encountered.
The inspiration for “Trails” came from a bit of family history. My Cherokee ancestors walked the Trail of Tears from the Carolinas, jumped off in Arkansas, and were caught up in the Civil War. All else is fiction.
I grew up in the post-segregation South, but the culture of the violent, cruel past continued to shape life and still does to a disturbing degree. "A Place Between" looks back at the misery from the perspective of a white woman.
After visiting a Spanish mission in the Southwest I wrote “When Wildflowers Bloom,” my fictional explanation for an unexplained peculiarity.
Several road trips through the West Texas desert inspired “Friday Night at the Outpost Bar and Grill.” I watched bedraggled, declining towns slide by and wondered what lines I would cross to escape.
“A Drive and a Drink with James Dean” revisits the characters of “Outpost.” I've had a drink in the bar at the Paisano Hotel in Marfa, and many times I’ve driven through the James Dean Intersection in California, where the star met the infamous Ford that killed him. All of that merged in my mind.
My grandmother told stories of life in Oklahoma farmland during the Dust Bowl of the thirties. “Dust” is partially her childhood seen through fictional eyes. Details of the environment and a diet of black-eyed peas are hers, but, no, her grandfather didn’t commit murder.