mary mcmyne

about the author

Mary McMyne was raised on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, Louisiana by ex-hippie parents who introduced her to Thoreau and Lewis Carroll and Frank Zappa at an impressionable age. Her mother sewed and sang and grew flowers and vegetables. Her father read voraciously and told evasive stories about Woodstock. They sent her to traditional Chinese art lessons and kept her in notebooks, which she filled with soap operas about parallel worlds and cardboard-box spaceships, and poems about dragons and comets.

Flash forward two decades, and she has a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from New York University and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English and creative writing from Louisiana State University. She is at work on a novel reimagining the Odysseus myth during the Vietnam War from the perspective of an American soldier's wife. Her awards include the Faulkner Prize for a Novel-in-Progress, the Robert Olen Butler Short Story Award, and the Tony Bill Screenwriting Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography have been published or will soon appear in Double Dealer, New Delta Review, Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life, Country Roads, and Web Del Sol. She is also a contributor to The Nervous Breakdown.

She lives in downtown Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan with her husband David, their daughter Alice, their rescued border collie, and their elderly black cat. She teaches writing, creative writing, and literature at Lake Superior State University, where she edits Border Crossing, a journal of art and literature. Before accepting the LSSU professorship, she taught writing, creative writing, and literature at New York University, New Jersey City University, ASACAP Columbia University, and South Louisiana Community College.

praise

"Stunning… Gorgeously lyrical, culturally hyper-observant, and acerbically intelligent. A real tour de force.”

- Janette Turner Hospital,
one of Australia's leading authors and Professor of Creative Writing at University of South Carolina, on WAIT, winner of the 2007 Faulkner Prize for a Novel in Progress.

“Mary McMyne's vibrant storytelling captured me in the first paragraph and held me until the last page. She delivers a deft, insightful tale of a sinister curse, a mother's terrible secret, and a young couple's healing love. Memorable characters and twists of fate make Ville Toulouse, a small Louisianatown in the 1920s, a place of curiosity, evil, and redemption.”

- Ronlyn Domingue
author, The Mercy of Thin Air (Atria 2005), on THE BLACKBIRDS OF VILLE TOULOUSE