Leigh Camacho Rourks has burst onto the publishing scene with guns blazing.
Fitting, given plenty of pistol-packing mamas take up gritty residence her debut book, Moon Trees and Other Orphans.
鈥淚 think my audience are people who like to be transported, who enjoy turning over the grittier rocks, and who know that love is at the heart of even our most savage stories,鈥� said Rourks, an assistant professor of English and humanities at 海角社区 in Leesburg, Fla. The nonprofit liberal arts school is America鈥檚 first accredited baccalaureate school to educate primarily students who learn differently.
Tapping the vein of gothic known as 鈥済rit-lit鈥� or 鈥渞ough South,鈥� her book collects 鈥渟hort stories set along the Gulf Coast, focusing on themes of desperation, loneliness, and love,鈥� she said. 鈥淔illed with hard-living characters who are deeply lonely, it tracks the ways they fight for survival, often making very bad decisions along the way. Populated by gun toting women, ex-cons, desperate teens, and other outsiders, it is a collection about what life is like in hard places, beautiful and dangerous.鈥�
Rourks began writing years ago the stories that fill Moon Trees. She tweaked and published them along the way as individual pieces.
鈥淥ne of the stories took something like a decade (at least) to get right,鈥� she said.
The recipient of the St. Lawrence Press Award, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize, her gift for grit owes to literary influences that run a straight line from Flannery O鈥機onner to crime novelist extraordinaire Elmore Leonard.
鈥淚 started reading Elmore Leonard novels when I was a teen, maybe a pre-teen, and I was just out of high school when I met O鈥機onner,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 am heavily influenced by such a variety of writers, people like Harry Crews and Bonnie Jo Campbell and BK Loren, and even Dick Francis, and so many more.鈥�
The Cuban-American author鈥檚 tales aren鈥檛 Aesop fables for Millennials. Don鈥檛 necessarily go panning for clear-cut lessons in her literary gold.
鈥淚鈥檓 not sure about lessons,鈥� she said, 鈥渂ut I do hope they meet a piece of the America they may not know much about or re-see a piece that they only thought they knew.鈥�
is available from .