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Robert Morgan was raised on his family's farm in the North Carolina mountains. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and eight books of fiction, including the bestselling novel Gap Creek. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. He won the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 2007.
Robert R. Morgan's website
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When I began writing Gap Creek I knew I wanted to tell a story loosely
based on the first year of marriage of my maternal grandparents. They had gotten
married about a hundred years before on Mount Olivet and moved down to Gap Creek
in South Carolina. I knew them as elderly people when I was very young. Grandma,
who kept me during the day while my mother worked in the cotton mill, died when
I was three. I wanted to tell a story about a woman like her, who did heavy
men's work on the farm, and spent her life working for others, for her sisters
and her husband, her children and grandchildren, the sick and needy of the
community.
I tell my students that you do not write living fiction by attempting to
transcribe actual events onto the page. You create a sense of real characters
and a real story by putting down one vivid detail, one exact phrase, at a time.
The fiction is imagined, but if it is done well, it seems absolutely true, as
real as the world around us.
The hardest work I did on Gap Creek was trying to get the voice right.
Julie, who tells her own story, is not well educated and is not much of a
talker. In fact, she feels inarticulate. She feels she expresses herself best
with her hands, with her work. ...
M. Allen Cunningham's debut novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow, set in nineteenth-century Northern California, was a #1 Book Sense Pick and a finalist for the 2005 Book Sense Book of the Year Award alongside Marilynne... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Gap Creek
Try:
The Green Age of Asher Witherow
by M. Allen Cunningham
Charles Frazier was born in 1950 in Asheville, North Carolina and grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973, received an M.A. from Appalachian State ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Gap Creek
Try:
Thirteen Moons
by Charles Frazier
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