Dana Staves received her Master of Fine Art in fiction from Old Dominion University. While attending ODU, Dana was awarded an internship at the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she had the oportunity to work closely with writers and artists. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is learning to tap dance and is working on her first collection of short stories. Officially free from required reading for her MFA thesis, Dana has expanded her horizons and recently read and enjoyed A Brief History of Time by Shaindel Beers, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer by Chely Wright, and Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens by Liz Goldwyn.
Carin Clevidence’s debut novel, The House on Salt Hay Road, tells the story of three generations of the Scudder family living on Long Island in the 1930s just before a catastrophic hurricane moves in. This novel’s careful balance of happiness and tragedy, success and failure, leads Dana Staves to consider how the writing achieves this alchemy.
The yarn-like stories that make up this debut collection recount the life of an imagined town in northern Virginia. Unlike a traditional collection, Neofotis chooses an oral storytelling method to structure these stories, utilizing the conceit that the narrator is not just the vehicle through which we are relayed the narrative but an actual character himself, one who sits down beside us to spool out poignant stories, juicy pieces of gossip, and far-fetched legends from his small town.
