T.L. Crum was born and raised on a dairy farm in Southern California, less than a mile from a maximum security prison. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern California Review, Short Story America, and Fringe Magazine, among others. Despite her loathing for the heat, she’s chosen to pursue her MFA in fiction at California State University, Fresno, where she works as an assistant editor for The Normal School, and co-edits the San Joaquin Review. Currently revising her first novel, she is anxious to get started on her second. Some of the books she’s recently turned to for inspiration include: Andre Dubus’s In the Bedroom, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. When weather permits, she and her husband can be found chasing their indefatigable three year-old around the park.
Every work of fiction is grown from at least one seed of truth, whether it’s an emotional truth, an actual event, or a fact of nature. For Michelle Hoover, author of the elegant debut novel The Quickening, this seed was a fifteen-page document that her great-grandmother typed out in the final year of her life. In it, “broken hearted and sick in mind and body,” she recounted her seven decades as an Iowa farmwoman. Loosely based on this document and family oral histories, The Quickening follows the journeys of two Iowan families trying to build their lives amid the hardships of the Great Depression.
Sidebar Header
Welcome to Fiction Writers Review, an online literary journal by, for, and about emerging writers. more >
