Brian Panowich feels a bit strange writing about himself in the third person but he will do his best. Brian started out as a firefighter who wrote stories and morphed into a writer who fights fire. He has written three novels, a boatload of short stories, and maintains a monthly column called “Scattered & Covered” for Augusta Magazine. He lives in East Georgia with four children who are more beautiful and more talented than anyone else’s. He also might be biased. Brian’s first novel, Bull Mountain, topped the 2015 best thriller list on Apple iBooks, placed in the top twenty best books on Amazon, and went on to win the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel, as well as the Southern Book Prize for Best Mystery. The book was also nominated for the Barry Award, the Anthony Award, Georgia’s Townsend Prize, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Bull Mountain was also selected for the coveted “Books All Georgians Should Read” list by the Georgia Center of the Book, and has been the recipient of several foreign press awards. Daniel Woodrell and C. J. Box really like his latest novel, Like Lions, so Brian is pretty happy.
• I remember when my wife and I bought our first home. It was a three-bedroom townhouse that was immediately too small the month after we bought it because she got pregnant with our son, Wyatt — the youngest of our four kids. I was a full-time firefighter at the time and I only worked ten twenty-four-hour shifts a month. I enjoyed my time off. Our first summer in the townhouse I bought a big yellow inflatable pool for the backyard and read a lot of books in a lawn chair while the kids got bigger and bigger right before my eyes. One of those books was a collection of stories by various masters called Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. I don’t have a clue where I got it from, but it was an old faithful read, and I discovered a lot of authors I’d come to idolize. Tom Franklin’s “Poachers” was in that book and it quite literally changed my life — but that’s a different matter altogether. The point is, I remember as if it were minutes ago, thinking to myself how amazing it must feel to be included among the writers in that book. I also thought about how far out of reach and impossible it would be for a forty-year-old Elmore Leonard — loving fireman to ever see his name tagged on that wall.
Hey, y’all. Not impossible.
Because here I am, holding the can of spray paint.
Huge bearhug to Patrick Ryan, my editor on “A Box of Hope.”
The story was written for my father. I cry every time I read it. I hope he’s pleased.
Waiter, more wine, please.
Tonya D. Price publishes both fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Pocket Book and Fiction River anthologies. She draws on her MBA, high-tech business career, and time overseas at the World Health Organization to write international thrillers. She designed her nonfiction series, Business Books for Writers, to help authors who are not business-savvy navigate the serious business of writing. She is currently working on the fourth book in the series. In her most recent novel, a World War II young-adult historical, an American teenager struggles to retain his birthright identity while held as an enemy alien behind the barbed wire of the Crystal City Family Internment Camp. You can find Tonya online at www.tonyadprice.com or on Twitter @BusBooks4Writer.
• When I needed to write a fast-paced story for an anthology submission, I remembered a spring day as I walked to my mailbox at the end of our long driveway. I spotted a large dog running toward me down the middle of our country street. I worried he might get hit, as the street is on a hill with a large blind curve. A blue sportscar raced past me, windows down. Two teenage boys screamed what my grandma would call “bad words” at the dog. I tried to distract them by picking up a softball-size rock from my stone wall. I tossed the stone at them while yelling “Slow down!” The rock landed harmlessly behind the car as it rounded the curve, brakes screeching. My first thought was that the car had hit the dog. A few minutes later I was relieved to see the dog unharmed and hiding in the pines beside our house. When I sat down to write the story, I asked myself, “What would have happened if the rock had hit that car?” I had great fun answering that question, but I have never looked at my house in quite the same way.
Suzanne Proulx is one of countless authors to have published a book entitled Bad Blood. In her case that book was the first of a series featuring hospital risk manager Vicky Lucci, which has been translated into several languages. She is a longtime member of Mystery Writers of America, has been a reader for MWA’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and is the editor of Deadlines, the newsletter of the Rocky Mountain MWA chapter.
• I envisioned “If You Say So” as a Valentine’s Day story, but kind of a grim one. He has his scenario — who he thinks he is, how he thinks other people perceive him, how he wants her to see him — and of course she has her scenario, and nobody is quite who the other thinks they are. Not at the beginning, and in this case, definitely not at the end.
I had written the first draft when I saw the call for entries from Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers for the False Faces anthology. I thought “If You Say So” would be a good fit, and was really excited when Angie Hodapp and Warren Hammond, the editors, agreed.
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena, in addition to six other novels; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
• During the Civil War, Madison County, North Carolina, like most parts of southern Appalachia, had strong Unionist sympathies. When Secession was proposed in 1861, the county voted solidly against it. Once the war began, the county became known as Bloody Madison. In the most notorious incident, Confederate troops massacred thirteen men and boys in the Unionist stronghold of Shelton Laurel, the place where the story is set. But the impetus for “Neighbors” was contemporary events, and those who are caught between allegiance and denial of community.