On May 11, 2020, Miriam’s second novel A Stone for Bread won the 2020 Eric Hoffer competition Legacy Award, which placed the novel on the short list for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Prior to publication, the Stone for Bread manuscript was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 International Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Novel Competition. In 2016, it was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Published by Livingston Press of the University of West Alabama, the novel received a starred Kirkus review through the Kirkus Indy program and was cited by Kirkus as an Indy Best book of the year for 2016. It was a 2017 Finalist in the International Book Awards, Literary Fiction category.

On May 11, 2020, Miriam’s second novel A Stone for Breadwon the 2020 Eric Hoffer competition Legacy Award, which placed the novel on the short list for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Prior to publication, the Stone for Bread manuscript was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 International Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Novel Competition. In 2016, it was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious Sir Walter…

Coming Soon: THE BASILISK, a novel of 12th Century France

Coming Soon, Miriam’s medieval novel THE BASILISK

1. Lucky, The Backstory: A Grassy Field and a Basketball Goal

I wrote my Doris Betts Literary Award winning story Lucky some eighteen years ago. I had just stepped down then as coordinator of an inner city program in Charlotte, N.C. for Southeast Asian teenagers. How I had even found myself in that position resulted from “one-thing-led to-another” decisions that kept me at it for over…

2. LUCKY, The Backstory: Reality

Our group wasn’t the first such program in this area of Charlotte. Before I came out there, the church already had a Wednesday evening meal for area children. My husband and others had also helped facilitate several programs among Southeast Asians in neighborhoods not far from our site, one in a large downtown church, another…

3. LUCKY, The Backstory: Settling In

It wasn’t long before more volunteers arrived and the Cambodian pastor and his congregation moved to the same site. Soon these programs were welcoming neighboring children and the programs were sharing the church and field.  Volunteers from Charlotte churches began providing meals for the Wednesday and Sunday evening events and soon a program director was…

4. LUCKY, The Backstory: Travels

It began with a beach trip. Loading up the ministry bus, which the Cambodian pastor drove, we spent several days at a place at Myrtle Beach we’d found to host our group at a reasonable cost. After this trip, in which one of the guys broke his leg playing basketball at a nearby gym, we…

5. LUCKY, The Backstory: The Last Act

My goal as a volunteer had been to remain with the program until the first participants, still the core of the group, graduated from high school. And they all did graduate, among them several with honors. So I had expected to leave at the end of that summer, which I’d already  announced. But a more…

Writing the Historical Novel, Part 3: When the “Real” History Presents a Problem

Fiction is fiction, which means it doesn’t require absolute historical accuracy. But serious fiction writers often want to convey a “sense” of a culture or people, even when only imagining it. This is especially true if you’re not writing fantasy but attempting to create a “real” place, as, for example, author Jean Auel did in…

Writing the Historical Novel, Part 2: Using History

A novel that melds both history and fiction may at times seem paradoxical. But in the broader definition, this is fiction set during a particular historical time. It’s fiction, even when its characters are from the pages of history, stories of kings and queens, heroic men and women whom we learned about in school and…