Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Meg Mullins was born and raised in New Mexico. She attended Barnard College and earned her MFA from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications including The Sonoran Review, The Baltimore Review, The Iowa Review and TriQuarterly. The story that formed the basis of her first novel, The Rug Merchant, appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2002. She lives in New Mexico with her husband and their two children. Dear Strangers is her second novel.
From the author's website
Meg Mullins's website
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Would you share with readers the
source of the original idea for the story of The Rug
Merchant?
Originally, when I first conceived the
short story, the idea was based on a couple of family
anecdotes that I conflated into one story. I was six when my
grandmother died suddenly. Home alone, she'd had a heart
attack and collapsed on the bedroom rug. When she fell, she
hit her head and the wound left a small pool of her blood on
the rug. A few days later, my grandfather silently carried
the rug to the curb for the trash collector and stood there,
waiting, until it was picked up and taken away. That image
haunted and inspired me. But as often happens in fiction, an
image or an anecdote that may have sparked the idea will
become almost unrecognizable in the end. Then, after
finishing the short story, I had fallen in love with Ushman
as a character and was compelled by my curiosity to continue
writing about him as a man trying to find his way after a
devastating divorce.
You have captured the essence of Ushman's character so well - both his inner and outer life.
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