Roots of my Work

My people came from the hills and hollers of Eastern Kentucky—sharecroppers, coal-haulers, railroad hands, and women who raised children with grit and a side dish of neglect.

I grew up listening to their stories: the hard ones, the whispered ones, the ones told only after three or four drinks and after dark.

Those stories shaped me long before I learned how to write them.

My work lives at the intersection of wound and witness.

I write about what survives—the houses that sag, the bloodlines that don’t break, the daughters who return home even when “home” is the last place they should go. I believe in the power of memory, myth, and the Appalachian instinct to make something fierce out of very little.

I’ve traveled far from the mountains—California, New York, Europe, Asia—but the sounds of the holler at night echo in my voice no matter how far I roam.

You can hear it in every story I tell.

I don’t write nostalgia.
I write truth wrapped in story.
I write the places that made me and the places I made myself.

I write from the threshold—between what happened and what it felt like, between memory and omen, between the girl I was and the woman I became.

Walk inside the Big Ol’ House.

Read the chronology of The House of Fugate.

Meet the myth of Abra Rue.

Welcome to my work.