Sara Flannery Murphy

Sara Flannery Murphy grew up in Arkansas, where she divided her time between Little Rock and Eureka Springs, a small artists’ community in the Ozark Mountains. She received her MFA in creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis and studied library science in British Columbia. She lives in Oklahoma with her husband and son.

Murphy's newly released first novel is The Possessions.

From her Q&A with Haley Weiss for Interview magazine:

HALEY WEISS: I'd like to talk about what spurred you to write this. Did one element come first, like a character, or was it a broader interest in grief and this idea of possession?

SARA FLANNERY MURPHY: I think it really began more with the idea of The Elysian Society itself. I started with the very broad notion of this organization where people could come and reconnect with their lost loved ones. I was fascinated at first just by the idea of what would this mean? Who are the people who come here? But also, the workers themselves, they definitely interested me a bit more than the clients because there's that intimacy involved in performing this service for other people, and yet they remain unknown to you—that mix of doing something very, very personal but for people who don't know you very well, and ideally will never know you that well.

After kind of thinking about that for a while, I was interested in the idea of...[read on]

Visit Sara Flannery Murphy's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Possessions.

The Page 69 Test: The Possessions.

Writers Read: Sara Flannery Murphy.

--Marshal Zeringue