Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is the author of the new novel Sugar Run. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Southern Cultures, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution.

From Maren's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Sugar Run, and for your character Jodi?

A: Sugar Run came to me as Jodi--like she showed up in my mind and started talking to me, I don’t know where she came from, there is no particular person that I modeled her off of, she just showed up and I became smitten.

I started writing down little scenes, bits of things, most of it came to me as sharp images at first: a curtain blowing in the wind, a plastic cup of whiskey with melting ice, the smell of lemon cleaning product, the way your skin feels when you slide below the surface of the swimming pool after lying in the sun for a long while.

I spent years just gathering these snippets and then following the snippets until a plot began to appear, but at first it was Jodi--her voice and perspective--and images, lots and lots of images.

It was like I had to widen the lens, I would start with this tight perspective on a chandelier and then ask...[read on]

Visit Mesha Maren's website.

Writers Read: Mesha Maren.

--Marshal Zeringue