I took an undergraduate fiction workshop with Tom Franklin my last year at Sewanee. At the end of the semester, he encouraged me to apply to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. When I asked Tom whom I should work with, he said Barry Hannah.
I hadn’t heard of him. Then I read his collection Airships and was blown away.
On the first day of workshop, Barry wrote THRILL ME on the chalkboard. Halfway through the Conference, he workshopped one of the two stories that I gave him. I was twenty-two. They were the third and fourth that I had ever written.