A Poignant Photograph
On one of our travels to France, our family visited the Abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys which faces the Atlantic Ocean from…
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Travels to France
My husband’s chosen profession was that of a United Methodist minister, a position that offered him little family time. To…
How I Came to Write The Basilisk
In its own right, the existence of this novel is an epic story of its own. Years ago, when I…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Writing the Historical Novel, Part 1
When I began writing fiction, I never thought of myself as a historical novelist. Yet my two published novels tell…
6. For Such a Time as This: Reflections on A STONE FOR BREAD, Saints and Martyrs
I recently read The Blood of Emmett Till, an extraordinary book by North Carolina author and historian Tim Tyson. The…
5. For Such a Time as This, Reflections on A STONE FOR BREAD: a Nazi Flag in Charlottesville
When I began revising an old manuscript that became A Stone for Bread, I found myself wondering if one more…