This is me, newly returned home after sixty years away. This splendid tree stands in the most remote and wild part of our family farm in southern Illinois. Here, in the fall, deer and people listen to each other crunch through the leaves—neighbors who know the other is there, but don’t want to visit. In the spring, standing water in low places reflects the sky. No, wait! Those are drifts of bluebells instead. As long as I’ve known this special place, slightly higher than the land around it, with its ring of huge old trees like this one, I’ve felt the shimmer of a story, the details as shifty as the sunlight and shadows. My dad, when he was walking this area for the first time many years ago, considering buying more acreage, said it felt to him like a holy place in a way he couldn’t explain—which is exactly how a really good short story feels to me: like a holy place I can’t quite explain.

Hello. I’m Sharelle Byars Moranville, and I’m pleased to meet you. Stories have always compelled me. To read them, to listen to them. To write them.

Let me tell you my story: I left home for college in 1961 and didn’t return, except for visits, for all these years. Happily swimming in stories and language, I got three degrees in English Lit. Also, during this time, I wrote two adult novels. I landed a New York agent for the second one, and in an act of stunning naivety asked for my manuscript back when he suggested I might do a bit of revision before he started showing it around to editors. Finally through with college, I did a stint in academia, a stint in the corporate world, and, beginning in my mid-forties, a stint in motherhood when my husband and I adopted an eleven-year-old girl, who came with her own profoundly complicated story. Looking back, I realize this is when I began steeping myself in children and young adult literature as a steadying hand through our journey as a family. And reading so much in the genre eventually lured me into trying to write it. After 106 rejections, I finally sold a story to a kid’s magazine. My first novel for young readers was published in 2003. Thanks to a devoted agent of twenty years and caring editors, that novel and six more were recognized with stars and awards and translated into other languages. Also, while I was away, I served as a guardian ad litem for children caught up in the juvenile justice system, and I volunteered inside a women’s prison. Holding their hands in prayer circles, looking into their eyes, hearing the women’s stories changed me—as did the children’s stories, which taught me that even in the most broken of families, there was still love.

Being away had its season, and it was good. Now let me tell you my story of being home: Once again, I live in the deep quiet of fields and woods, across the pasture from where I grew up.  Blue birds flit through the yard of my tiny hundred-year-old cottage, which is wrapped in a picket fence. No kidding. A white picket fence with an arched gate with red honeysuckle vining over it. I feel the ancestors along familiar country roads, in the smell of harvest dust, in the cheerful zinnias that take over my garden in October, just as they did in my grandmother’s garden. My cousins and I quietly tell each other the messy family stories. My sisters and I tell each other the giggly, tearful growing-up stories. In my weekly book club (a Zoomed event which keeps me connected to my away people), we discuss nonfiction, memoir, poetry, novels, and short stories—most recently Diane Oliver’s posthumous collection Neighbors.

I’ve always been fascinated (and a little mystified) by the workings of the short story. As a graduate student, I read the short stories of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. Then later Alice Munro and Barbara Kingsolver; Graham Swift, Alister MacLeod, and Edith Pearlman. While I’ve always loved short stories as a reader, only fairly recently did it occur to me to write one. So I did. Exploring the familiar, yet different, writing process for short stories is exciting. The stories I write spring from the same source: An inner place like the rise of ground with the splendid trees, where I feel a story—a shimmer—the details shifty as the sunlight and shadows. The process of finding the story and giving it life does feel holy to me.

Whether you’re a reader or a writer or both or neither, thank you for reading this. May you find the pleasure of a good book or short story, written by yourself or someone else.

If you wish to contact me, you may do so through the contact link or on Facebook.