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Susan Rivers was awarded the Julie Harris Playwriting Award for Overnight Lows and the New York Drama League Award for Understatements. She is also the recipient of two playwriting grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and has had short fiction published in the Santa Monica Review. In 2007 she earned an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, where she was also awarded a Regional Artist Grant from the Arts and Sciences Council. She currently lives and writes in a small town in upstate South Carolina. The Second Mrs. Hockaday is her first novel.
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Voices, an essay by Susan Rivers
In the summer of 2014, I was in the library near my home in rural South Carolina. I was doing research for a book I'd been trying to write on and
off (mostly off ). It can be a hellish experience for a writer when no amount
of work on a project pays off in terms of the story taking flight, and that was
the case with my draft about a middle-aged woman living on a farm during
the Civil War. I seemed unable to locate the nexus of the story, what Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk so aptly refers to as "the secret center."
On
that July day, however, locked in the tiny, stifling History Room, I
stumbled across the summary of an 1865 inquest. As soon as I read it, I knew
this was a story begging to be told in novel form. A Confederate soldier who
had been away from his teenaged wife for four years arrived home at war's
end to confront rumors that his bride had become pregnant while he was
away. It was alleged that she had given birth to a son who had been killed
and buried on their farm. The baby's remains were unearthed, and the angry
husband pushed to have his wife indicted for murder. The young woman
refused to speak about the baby or to...
Sarah is the author of nine novels. The ninth, Above the East China Sea, was published in 2014. Sarah has been selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers series; a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship; New York Public Library... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Second Mrs. Hockaday
Try:
Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen
by Sarah Bird
Tara Conklin was born on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and New York University School of Law. Most... (more)
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The Second Mrs. Hockaday
Try:
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