I was born in Pontotoc, a little town nestled in the red clay hills of north Mississippi, thirty miles from William Faulkner’s Oxford and far from just about everywhere else. Memphis, New Orleans, even Jackson, Mississippi’s capital city, might as well have been worlds away. An only child, I grew up in the household with my parents and maternal grandparents. Six days a week, my dad worked from six in the morning until six at night in his auto parts store, and my mother kept his accounts. They wanted more than anything to give me a better life. When I was very young, I understood I was the center of their world, which may not have been a good thing.
My grandfather died when I was ten, but I can still see him: propped up in his bed, smoking Lucky Strikes even though he had only one lung, listening to baseball games on the radio. I can see my grandmother, too, baking biscuits on top of an oil heater after an ice storm knocked out our power (north Mississippi winters can be harsh) or working in the huge garden she kept without help. She was a teller of stories, a repository of family lore.
I was a quiet child. I read; I played with dolls; or I roamed our big yard, living much in my imagination. When I was eight years old, I wrote a mystery story my dad showed to his friend, a self-proclaimed mystery buff, who read it and pronounced it good. I was thrilled: I had written a story, and someone—a grownup—liked it! Somewhere along the way, though, I lost interest in writing and wrote only what was required in school.
We Southern girls were schooled to believe our highest calling was to become a wife and mother. Right out of college, I married a nice young man with “good prospects” and soon became a stay-at-home mom. Fifteen years and four children later, the marriage failed. I went to work as a preschool teacher and started graduate school, earning a Master’s degree in English. At forty, I began to figure out who I really was.
For more than twenty years, I taught English to high school students. Sharing my love of reading and writing with students rekindled my desire to write. I read everything I could find about writing craft and wrote along with my students. One summer, praise for a short story I wrote as a workshop assignment at Bard College’s Creative Week for Teachers started me thinking: maybe mid-life wasn’t too late to become a writer, after all.
Fast-forward a bunch of years and writing workshops and residencies: the untold stories that shaped me became the stories I could tell. In 2015, my first collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories, was published by Press 53. In 2024, Regal House Publishing released my debut novel, That Pinson Girl. And now, in 2026, Silent Clamor Press will bring my linked story collection to life: Storm Warning.
A seventh generation Mississippian, I live in Jackson with my husband, worthy poet and fiction writer in his own right (and retired English) professor, my best critic and cheerleader.
Photo by Christina Cannon. Used with permission.
Gerry Wilson 