Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
DIANE WHITESIDE | Special Places and Meals with Family and Friends
Author Guest / November 6, 2010

It’s November and time to think about sharing a meal with loved ones. I’ve always tucked bits of my family history into my Devil books but I didn’t realize how many ways they’d crept in until I started thinking about Thanksgiving traditions. My grandmother was born in a sod house in the Oklahoma Territory, where her father was an itinerant farm worker. She didn’t remember the house fondly — it was more of a hut, really, especially for seven children. It was dark and scary inside, the roof often dripped clods of dirt or mud into her food and hair, and continually sweeping the dirt floor never improved it. Somehow, years later, that dark and scary place climbed out of my subconscious to become Viola’s first home in THE IRISH DEVIL. “The mud-brick hovels revealed themselves as a pitiful group, with ill-fitting doors and crumbling bricks”This hut was smaller than the others and its only window was broken. The ragged curtains fluttered gently in the rising breeze…; “He cautiously entered the tiny hut. Mud-brick walls were totally covered by peeling pages from magazines and catalogues, forming a poor man’s wallpaper. The roof was a canvas tarpaulin, split open over one…