Join us on Tuesday, August 15th at 5:30 pm for an In Conversation event with author Meagan Lucas. She’ll be chatting about her collection of stories Here in the Dark. We’re excited to have Meagan in store with us and can’t wait to hear all about her writing processes and inspirations. So don’t miss out on this free event!
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
Here in the Dark, the first collection from award-winning author Meagan Lucas, is a gritty genre blending wallop of short stories, set mostly in Southern Appalachia, that explore the female experience of lawlessness. In the tradition of Dorothy Allison and Bonnie Jo Campbell, Lucas tackles, with unsettling honesty: poverty, addiction, motherhood, and social justice in an increasingly troubled cultural climate. These are character-driven stories about crime, but less a who-done-it mystery and more a meditation on how the vulnerable navigate a world devoid of true justice. Unflinching in its gaze, Here in the Dark is an ambitious collection from a bold and empathetic storyteller.
Perceptive, intimate, and brave, these sixteen stories encompass shame and forgiveness, loss and redemption, oppression and revolution, and signal a new way of thinking about power and trauma. In “Voluntary Action,” a sheriff’s deputy witnesses the overdose of a high school friend in her custody. In “Buttons,” a little girl, bullied by the neighbor boy, gets her revenge with a needle and thread. In “Sitting Ducks,” a hurricane bears down on mothers, daughters, and sisters in an un-evacuated women’s prison. In “Asylum” an immigrant woman, suffering a terrible loss, sees ghosts in the hotel and houses that she cleans. In “Hell, or High Water” a young woman with Stockholm syndrome is abandoned by her kidnapper deep in the woods of Western North Carolina. And in “Here in the Dark,” a newly clean addict is given the opportunity to start over with her son if only she’ll snitch on her former lover and pimp, but discovers, of course, it’s not that simple. Blending Lucas’ musical prose with high-tension stakes, and resonant characters, Here in the Dark is a collection not to be missed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs (Main Street Rag Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection Here in the Dark (Shotgun Honey, 2023). Meagan has published over 30 short stories and essays in journals like The Santa Fe Writers’ Project, Still: The Journal, MonkeyBicycle, Cowboy Jamboree, BULL, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and Canadian Crime Writer’s Award of Excellence nominated and won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs was chosen to represent North Carolina in the Library of Congress 2022 Route 1 Reads program. Meagan teaches in the Professional Writing Program at Robert Morris University. She is the Editor in Chief of Reckon Review. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Meagan loves: pugs, bourbon, houseplants, and bookstores.