Dear Reader,
I’m pleased to introduce today’s guest author, Samantha Jayne Allen, author of Pay Dirt Road, and winner of the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Set in the Southwest.
Samantha has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University, and her writing has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband in Atlanta. "Pay Dirt Road," her debut novel, is a small-town mystery about an unlikely private investigator searching for a missing waitress.
Write and say “Hello”. Samantha would love to hear from you. You can reach her at: [email protected]
Thanks for visiting our book club, Samantha…
The Mojave doesn't love you back. I used to ride to the cement plant in my dad's pickup, stare out the window at the hardpan dirt, wondering, if you stood in the middle of that wide-open, empty desert and screamed, would there be an echo, or without anything to bounce off of, would your call fade without refrain?
Every summer the plant hired employees' kids to work as laborers if they enrolled in college courses in the fall. Management encouraged us to stay in school by giving us jobs nobody wanted: stemming dynamite, shoveling coal, repainting the trucker bathrooms, scraping
gunk out of oil pits with a putty knife. The program doesn't exist anymore, but before it was canceled, before I left my hometown, before its sister plants closed and most of its employees were laid off, I spent my summers waiting for the place to grow kinder to me, to give me a reason to stay.
I didn't. But I often go back to the Mojave and its stark beauty, revisiting it in my mind with the kind of fondness only achieved with distance. I never fit in at work--for starters, I was one of only two women in the labor gang--but I clung tightly to the plant and its rhythms because I was scared of going to college, another place where I wasn't sure if I belonged. It was an impressionable time, but I also go back to those summers because in many ways, they taught me how to write. You can't write a story without conflict, without your characters experiencing competing desires. The ambivalence I felt suffused my ideas about where I was going and where I had been, and in turn, fueled my fiction.
Whenever I'm struggling to write, I remember the unique torture of sweeping dust into piles under an industrial-sized kiln when it was 115 degrees out, the hot wind like a hair dryer blowing the dust right back in my face. I got so dirty I'd line my car seat with trash bags, and strip at the door when I got home. There's something freeing, though, about working up a sweat, about being so dirty you lose any self-consciousness. I learned to submit to the work, and I didn't quit. You can't write if you're afraid of messy drafts, of mistakes, of rejection. I know now that I'm up to the task, and that to write you have to love the work, even if it doesn't always love you back.
-- Samantha Jayne Allen
Email: [email protected]
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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