Inman Majors is the author of five novels including the newly released Penelope Lemon: Game On!.
A native of Tennessee, Majors received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from The University of Alabama. He is a professor of English at James Madison University and makes his home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
From Majors's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Penelope Lemon?Visit Inman Majors's website.
A: The idea for the book came after years of coaching my son’s youth baseball teams in Waynesboro, Virginia, a small Appalachian town over the mountain from Charlottesville.
My teams were populated primarily by kids with single moms who worked at the Little Debbie factory, the Target distribution center, and other places where they punched the clock.
I admired the toughness of these women, their moxie, good humor, and grace. They seemed to keep a lot of balls in the air at once—working tough jobs, taking kids to sports practices, worrying about the oil light on their cars—and to do so with sense of self intact.
These were women in their 20s and 30s, most of them with more than one child to raise, most of them living paycheck to paycheck. It struck me that they didn’t feel particularly put-upon by life.
This was life: scrambling to be in two places at once, scrambling to pay bills, scrambling when life throws you a curveball like a blown head gasket on the car or the sudden loss of a job.
The character in this book is something of...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Penelope Lemon: Game On!.
--Marshal Zeringue