Under the Mercy Trees (29 page)

Authors: Heather Newton

BOOK: Under the Mercy Trees

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So many people encouraged me while I was writing this novel. I am profoundly grateful to the Flatiron Writers of Asheville, past and present, especially GenÃ¨ve Bacon, Toby Heaton, Diana Stoll, Maggie Marshall, and Jennifer Fawkes. My deep thanks to Jill McCorkle for her thoughtful feedback at Sewanee and to the other members of the 2008 McCorkle-Earley workshop, especially Sarah Crow and David McGlynn, who gave me a second read on their own time; to my other readers, Suzanne Newton, Lynda Gralla Mottershead, April Spencer, Bill and Julie Latham, Joanne Ryan, Craig and Cari Newton, Mark Mennone, David Snyder, and all the rest of you who read all or part of it and told me what you thought. My appreciation to Walter Cox for his memories of four-room school houses and phone service in rural North Carolina; Jay Latham for his descriptions of cars and college life in the 1950s; Margaret Errington and my other lawyer pals for their expertise on probate law; Deborah Steely for Helen Steiner Rice-A-Roni; the Outer Banks History Center; Jenny Cox and the Castelloe family for entertaining my child while I wrote; Tommy Hays for helping me get on with my next project; and UNC Asheville's Greatest Smokies Writing Program for its valuable support of me and other western North Carolina writers. I am indebted to my agent, Liv Blumer, and my editor, Gabe Robinson, for going to bat for the novel. In developing the character of Martin Owenby I found two books to be particularly helpful:
Stonewall
by Martin Duberman and
Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories
edited by Patrick Merla. Finally, and by no means least, I thank my parents: Carl Newton, who always assumed I could do anything, and Suzanne Newton, who showed me the discipline and joy of the writer's life.

About the Author

HEATHER NEWTON
's short stories have appeared in
Crucible
;
Encore
magazine;
Lonzie's Fried Chicken
;
O, Georgia!
; and
Wellspring
, among other publications. She lives with her family in Asheville, North Carolina, where she is an attorney and mediator. This is her first novel.

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Credits

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover photograph by Scan Justice/Getty Images

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

UNDER THE MERCY TREES.
Copyright Â© 2011 by Heather Newton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition January 2011 ISBN: 9780062042392

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