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Patricia Henley’s first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and the New Yorker Fiction Prize (2000). Her second novel, In the River Sweet, was named a Best Fall Book by the St. Louis Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has also published three collections of stories (Friday Night at Silver Star, The Secret of Cartwheels, and Worship of the Common Heart). Patricia has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University for twenty years. www.patriciahenley.com

When did you start writing? Submitting? Can you put your finger on what part of your own process began to lead to publication?

I wrote poems when I was a child and I wrote teenage bodice-rippers when I was in high school. In college I discovered Anne Sexton and her work gave me permission to write poetry about being a troubled young woman. Later, when I started writing fiction, I felt a connection to the work of Alice Munro and it served the same purpose: I was given permission to write about the lives of the men and women I knew, the people of a rural-small town milieu.

I probably submitted my work too soon. You can waste plenty of time, postage, and emotional energy around submitting your work before it’s ready. The part of my own process that led to publication was tapping into the vein of material that was mine and mine alone. When I first began writing fiction I was just messing around, with story lines that had nothing to do with me, with sentences, just to learn how to write sentences. When I started writing about what mattered to me, then I heard my fictional voice and my stories took on power they had not had before. I’ve seen this happen over and over with young writers. They claim their true subject matter and everything falls into place.

Ted Solotaroff has a helpful essay about this: "Going Through the Pain." I recommend it to all new writers who are questing after their own original voices.

"Raymond Carver: Going Through the Pain" by Ted Solotaroff, appeared on pages 47 - 49 of the March/April 1989 issue of the American Poetry Review.

Glimmer Train has been discovering, publishing, and paying emerging writers since 1990.

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