Karen Garloch asks: Why is there such a rich mystique surrounding Southern literature, but we rarely talk about Midwestern literature in the same way?
After I met Karen at the Regal House Publishing conference in Chicago, I became curious about her writing. Her debut novel, Stray Voltage, captures the rhythms of rural Indiana with remarkable authenticity, exploring family, community, faith, and the values that shape so much of the Midwest.
In this installment of my What, Why, How series, Karen shares how a decades-long journalism career led her to fiction, why she felt compelled to tell this story, and the writing practices that carried her from first draft to finished novel.
What:
I wrote Stray Voltage, my first novel, after 45 years as a newspaper reporter in Ohio and North Carolina. Writing fiction after a career focused on non-fiction—based on interviews, documents, and facts–was a difficult transition. It helped that I set my fictional story in a real place, rural southern Indiana where I grew up, and based it loosely on the real-life experience of a childhood friend whose dairy cows died mysteriously over many years. While I relied on memories of real experiences and actual places, I still had to create personalities for my characters and come up with challenges and conflicts to create tension-filled fiction.
With help from teachers and fellow students at Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, I learned to explore what my characters needed, not just what they wanted. I learned to discover and share their inner thoughts, not just what they said out loud. It was exciting to set up conflicts between my main characters, the farm couple Hillie and Fred, and between them and their neighbors and other community leaders. I worked hard to build an imaginary world with scenes and tension that would propel readers forward. One of my reviewers called the book a “gracefully written page turner” that is “part medical mystery, and partly a tale of corporate greed and family values put to the test.” It made me think I had accomplished my goal.
Why:
When I moved from Ohio to North Carolina as an adult, I immersed myself in the storied world of Southern literature. I read contemporary novels by Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, Pat Conroy and many others. I quickly realized that some of the values Southerners hold so dear are much like those of Midwesterners I know so well.
People in the South talk about Southern Hospitality as if they alone are welcoming and friendly. Where I grew up, “Hoosier Hospitality” is a common phrase, and we are proud of it. Southerners also claim they are the ones who say “Bless your heart” without really meaning it sincerely. Where I’m from, we talk about “Midwestern Nice,” which also means a polite exterior that masks passive-aggressive, judgmental behavior.
It took moving away from Indiana for me to understand how special and undervalued Midwestern values are. I wondered why there isn’t a mystique about Midwestern literature as there is about Southern lit. When I had time, especially on beach vacations, I started to think about writing a novel set in the small piece of Indiana where I grew up. I made notes about family stories and community traditions that I could use in a fictional story. I wanted to tell the story of German farmers who work hard, pray hard, and care deeply for their families and neighbors. Even though Stray Voltage is not a true story, it refers to the (real) one-room parochial school I attended for the first seven grades, the church where I was baptized, confirmed, and married, and the butchering days when we slaughtered cows and pigs each winter.
As I was writing this, I thought about the song in the musical Hamilton when Eliza asks, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” I felt pulled to tell my story about the place I knew from childhood.
How:
Like many writers, I started keeping journals in childhood. I have boxes of journals and diaries from every year of my life since sixth grade.
In high school and college, I fell in love with newspaper journalism, and during my career as a professional reporter, I grew accustomed to writing on deadline, on demand.
So, when I began to seriously write my novel in 2020, I didn’t wait for a muse. I just went to my home office, or to the back deck, or to a coffee shop, and sat down to write. I wrote a lot of my early notes in longhand. But when I got more serious, I used my laptop and a wonderful software program called Scrivener to help organize chapters and research for my novel. I’m not a morning person, so I usually started working after lunch and continued for hours, sometimes until 6 or 7 p.m. I always started by logging into a document where I kept track of my daily progress. Which chapter I had worked on. What scene I had written. What I still needed to do.
I tried to end every work period by writing myself a note about what scene or action should come next. That way, I wouldn’t be at a loss the next time I signed on to my computer.
I’ve heard that writers are either plotters (who plot out their stories) or pantsers (who work by-the-seat-of-their-pants). I am definitely a plotter. But I have always hated outlines with Roman numerals. In Authors Lab, I learned to create a simple “scene sequence.” In this type of outline, I wrote small scene descriptions in the order I thought they should appear, but it was easy to move them around. (No Roman numerals to worry about.) The sequence did change, and it worked very well.
As I write, I always find that good ideas, better words, and effective phrases come to me when I need them. It’s as if the movement of my fingers on the keyboard helps engage my mind, and I’m in the flow.
I worked seriously on Stray Voltage for about three years. I wrote on my laptop almost every day, but I also took breaks so I could let the project percolate. Then I could come back with fresh eyes. I often read my work aloud, which is something we did at the Charlotte Observer. Hearing the words gives me a feel for the rhythm of sentences that I don’t get from reading them on the computer. I also make printouts, because reading words on a paper allows me to see them differently. I always find mistakes and problems that I didn’t see on the computer screen.
Finally, I love revision. I enjoy working with good editors, either fellow writers or paid editors. Early readers have saved me from many mistakes and offered suggestions for cool plot twists, subplots, and character changes.
I’ll never forget attending a talk by the great American writer Toni Morrison maybe 20 years ago in Charlotte. She basically said, unless you love, love, love rewriting, you’ll never be a writer. I agree.
“Stray Voltage is a vivid portrait of the joys and perils of farm life and what it takes for the dutiful among us to stand up to the disbelievers, the domineering – or the gossips in the next pew.”
—Kathryn Schwille, author of What Luck, This Life
Buy Stray Voltage Regal House Publishing | Bookshop.org | Amazon
Bio:
Karen Garloch is a first-time author and an award-winning journalist. She spent 45 years as a newspaper reporter at the Middletown Journal and the Cincinnati Enquirer in Ohio and the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. As the Observer’s longtime health reporter, she was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting.
Her novel, Stray Voltage, won the 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction from Regal House Publishing. A native of southern Indiana, she graduated from Ball State University, where she is a member of the Journalism Hall of Fame. She and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina.