Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she worked at The Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, and Globalpost, among others and her short fiction has appeared in The Broad River Review and Barren Magazine. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists, edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. She is a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator. She lives outside Boston with her husband and four children.Shelburne's new novel is Holding On To Nothing.
From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Holding On To Nothing, and for your characters Jeptha and Lucy?Visit Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne's website.
A: Lucy came to me with the line "Lucy had a smile that made people feel safe," which was the first line of the book for a long time. I pictured a really strong young woman, who experiences a lot of loss in her life and yet manages to maintain a scarred optimism.
Jeptha is inspired by some of the boys and men I saw around me growing up, who sometimes had rough reputations but good hearts. Jeptha deeply wants to be a good man, but doesn't really know how. I knew if Lucy and Jeptha were in the same room, there would be...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Holding On To Nothing.
My Book, The Movie: Holding On To Nothing.
--Marshal Zeringue