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265 Sheri Reynolds Sheri Reynolds is the author of four novels. Born in South Carolina, she received a BA degree from Davidson College and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Her first two novels remaindered , her third rejected, she was living on credit cards when she learned that The Rapture of Canaan had been selected for Oprah’s Book Club. She is an assistant professor of English at Old Dominion University. She lives in Virginia, on the eastern shore. Bitterroot Landing, 1994; The Rapture of Canaan, 1995; A Gracious Plenty, 1997; Firefly Cloak, 2006 Flannery O’Connor said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” How did your childhood , your family, give you the kind of information you needed to become a writer? I feel like I could tell stories from now until the moon turns to cheese if I wanted to. I certainly never worry about running out of stories to tell. I think O’Connor just means that everybody has stories—and plenty of them. No shortage of material. But then you have to ask yourself why the story merits telling; or, in other words, why it should mean something to somebody else. For me, this is the writer’s job—to find the story within the experience, the particular slant that transcends the personal to speak to more universal themes. As far as my “stuff” goes—Lord God, I hate to get started. There’s a part of me that aches to do my writing, and there’s another part of me that doesn’t want to go into my “stuff.” Some years I write. Some years I watch the sun set. Lately I’ve been preferring the sky. When I’m in this sort of place, I can’t imagine why anybody would ever choose to write when they 266 the INtervIewS could watch the sun set. I hope I will never choose writing over making love. I hope I never miss a family vacation to work on a book. Words are not life. This is a very good thing. A story is important, but a story has its place . . . My childhood did shape what I write, I guess. I was a terrified little kid. My parents were teenagers, living in a trailer beside my grandma’s house, working very hard to make a living. My daddy was rough; my momma defended him. My daddy would shoot his gun inside our trailer, and my momma would cover the hole in the floor with a rug so nobody would know. And all I wanted to do was uncover that hole and stare at it. I wanted to tell everybody that there was a hole in the floor, and I was too scared to speak. I can’t even remember why he shot the gun inside the house. As I recall, we had rats that were stealing our washrags out of the bathroom and running right down the hall with them. I think he shot his gun to kill the rats. I have a dead rat in my memory, with its mouth blocked up with a washrag, but I don’t know if that’s real or not. I think one of the reasons I write is because I no longer remember whether it was real or not, whether the rat with the washrag was real, or the hole in the floor, or the rug that covered the hole. The fear was real, though, and so I need to write. And I write because I live with a guilt I can’t overpower or make peace with—the fact that my daddy and momma loved me (and still love me), and I go around telling people about the gun and the hole in the floor, the rat and the washrag. There’s this tension I struggle with—I was loved and I was still terrified. I was loved, and my daddy had this gun. Where I was from, girls were made into little wives and mothers in a thousand ways; daddies buying little lacy bras and panties for sweet-faced daughters who smiled in the snapshots Mommy took. Makes me sick, this sexualization—and the complicity of the women. The dance lessons girls must take, and the sleazy costumes for the recitals. Just thinking about my cousins and niece in those costumes—the same kind I wore—that alone gives me enough fury to...

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