Cassie McCullagh

But someone who knew, a writer who knew I was trying to find my voice gave me a book of short stories called Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason, which

Bobbi Ann Mason is from Kentucky.

She's a bogan, like me.

She wrote about rural people going to the Kmart, doing country people things.

And she wrote so beautifully and she found eloquence and heroism in these people who were my people.

The scales fell from my eyes.

I said, oh, this is what I'm doing wrong.

I need to own my own voice.

And then I started reading Wendell Berry.

And I mean, there's so many Kentucky writers, James Still, Robert Penn Warren, and many more contemporary, beautiful, beautiful writers from Kentucky.

I backtracked and I owned my own voice and I wrote a short story called Homeland.

It was published as Homeland.

At the time I wrote it, it was called The Waterbug's Children.

about people living in the area where I grew up and going back to try to find the ancestral home of this Cherokee grandmother.

And that was the first good story I ever wrote because I took ownership of my own voice, accent, language, culture, people.

That was a revelation.

Thank you.

That's the highest compliment.

And you even have the titles of his books.

He wrote kind of pulp fiction set in pre-Columbian Mexico.