Sally Whitney

Sally Whitney is the author of the novel Surface and Shadow, available now from Pen-L Publishing, Amazon.com, and Barnesandnoble.com. Surface and Shadow is the story of a woman who risks her marriage and her husband’s career to find out what really happened in a wealthy man’s suspicious death.

Sally’s short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017, Main Street Rag, Kansas City Voices, Uncertain Promise, Voices from the Porch, New Lines from the Old Line State: An Anthology of Maryland Writers and Grow Old Along With Me—The Best Is Yet to Be, among others. The audio version of Grow Old Along With Me was a Grammy Award finalist in the Spoken Word or Nonmusical Album category. Sally’s stories were also a finalist in The Ledge Fiction Competition and semi-finalists in the Syndicated Fiction Project and the Salem College National Literary Awards competition.

Articles contributed by this author

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

7/10/2017. MY SUNSHINE AWAY—WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING

Most novels that include an assault in the plot feature that assault as the main event. One of the beauties of M.O. Walsh’s debut novel My Sunshine Away is that the rape described on page one is not the main event, no matter how much the young narrator wants to think it is.

At age 14, the narrator, who remains nameless throughout the story, is infatuated with his 15-year-old neighbor Lindy. So, when she is attacked coming home from track practice one summer night in 1989, he thinks the world as he knows it is destroyed. Through his remaining adolescence, he sees life through the prism of the rape and how it affects Lindy’s relationship with him, while all around him so much else is happening that belies the idyllic quality of his southern neighborhood and that will shape him into the adult he becomes. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

6/10/2017. TRAVELING WITH MISS JULIA

Summer is the time for road trips, and one of the best traveling companions is a phone or iPad full of audiobooks. If I’m driving alone, I get antsy if I have to go very far without one of these lively passengers. They’re also great for sharing if you have one that everybody in the car likes. I find the best books for travel are lighter fare because it’s hard to keep up with complex plots when traffic takes your attention.

One of my favorite series of books for listening in the car is the Miss Julia series by Ann B. Ross. Miss Julia is a clever, opinionated, and lovable woman of a certain age who has a knack for getting involved in thorny circumstances, sometimes by her own actions, but usually not. She’s weathered many a surprise in her later years, not the least of which is the arrival on her doorstep of a young woman claiming to be the mother of Miss Julia’s late husband’s son. How Miss Julia handles this development is both funny and touching. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

5/10/2017. INTERVIEW WITH LILY IONA MACKENZIE, AUTHOR OF FLING!

Lily Iona MacKenzie is a multi-talented author who follows her muse through short stories, novels, nonfiction, and poetry. In her novel Fling!, which I reviewed here last month, she explores the profound influences (good and bad) of family relationships, even after family members die, but she does it with humor and joy. Using magical realism, MacKenzie celebrates life and spiritual ties in many forms. Her own life experiences include working as a long distance telephone operator, a secretary, a longshoreman, manager of a homeless shelter, and writing teacher at the University of San Francisco. Her next novel, Curva Peligrosa, will be released by Regal House Publishing later this year. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

4-10-2017. FLING!—A NOVEL OF MAGICAL REALISM AND REAL MAGIC

At first read, you might think Fling! by Lily Iona MacKenzie is a delightful story with endearing, charming characters—which it is. But look a little closer, and you’ll find it’s also a probing story picking at deep layers of family love and resentment. Just below the characters’ zest for life lie feelings of aloneness and abandonment. Once those feelings are laid bare, can they ever be subdued?

Fling!’s main characters are mother and daughter Bubbles and Feather. Ninety-year-old Bubbles is still full of enthusiasm and looking for laughter wherever she can find it. MacKenzie tells us Bubbles’ motto is fun. “Life was too short; you needed to have a little fun. … Money didn’t matter that much to her, as long as she could have a good time.” (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

3/10/2017. THE INVENTION OF WINGS—EXPLORING THE SOUL OF A WOMAN WHO LEARNED TO FLY

Ever since The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd was released in 2014, I’ve heard it described as the story of the relationship between a white girl and the enslaved black girl who is given to her as her personal maid on her eleventh birthday. The novel is that story, but its deeper story is the evolution of the white girl, Sarah Grimké, into not only a leader of the abolitionist movement but also one of the first proponents of women’s rights.

Sarah Grimké was a real person who was born into Charleston aristocracy and grew up there in the years before the U.S. Civil War. Kidd used diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and Sarah’s own writing as well as biographical material to learn the facts of Sarah’s life and many of her desires, struggles, and motivations. But the beauty of this novel comes from the rich inner life that Kidd imagines for Sarah, even as a child. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

2/10/2017. MAX PERKINS–THE EDITOR EVERY WRITER YEARNS FOR

Most fiction fans know about Maxwell Perkins’s role in paring down Thomas Wolfe’s sprawling narratives to shape them into manageable novels. Fewer people are familiar with the massive influence Perkins had on other iconic American fiction writers and on the literary standards of the early 20^th century. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, the National Book Award winner by A. Scott Berg, tells Max’s story with all the color and style worthy of its subject. Filled with details and personalities, the biography reads like a novel, following the brave exploits of its central character. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

1/10/2017. BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Take a beautiful sea setting, add a few endearing but complex characters, top it off with serious moral dilemmas, and what do you get? The Light Between Oceans, an excellent debut novel by M.L. Stedman.

Set mostly at a lighthouse on Janus Rock, an island off the coast of Australia, The Light Between Oceans tells the story of Tom and Isabel Sherbourne, the lighthouse keeper and his wife, who live alone on the island, visited only once a season by two men who bring them supplies. This isolated existence suits Tom, who believes that if he can get far enough away from people and memories, time will heal the mental and emotional wounds he carries from fighting in World War I, especially the nightmares that remind him of the blood on his hands. He is a meticulous lighthouse keeper, always making sure the light goes on and off at the correct times and recording everything he should in the leather-bound log. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

11/10/2016. A MAN CALLED FREDRIK BACKMAN

Novels that pack a punch but still leave the reader feeling uplifted don’t come along very often. Too frequently, novels tend to depict the world we live in as dangerous and dreary or they’re filled with unflappable optimists and do-gooders. Swedish author Fredrik Backman walks the line between those two scenarios perfectly in his first two novels, A Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry.

I read A Man Called Ove first and loved its main character, a grouchy old man who’s set in his ways and seems to have no tolerance for anyone who can’t understand that his way is not just the right way; it’s the only way. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

10/10/2016. ALL IN THE FAMILY—THE PERFECT CAULDRON FOR CONFLICT

According to the 2011 FBI Uniform Crime Report, 24.8 percent of U.S. murder victims were killed by family members. That’s a nearly a quarter of all murders. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that family violence (including assault, murder, robbery, and sex offenses) accounted for 11 percent of all reported and unreported violence between 1998 and 2002. Although we don’t have statistics for the flip side of family passions, anyone who has experienced a tragedy knows the profound role family love and support can play during those times. And also how deep an emotional wound inflicted by a family member can go. Because family relationships are among the most highly charged of any relationships in human experience, families offer the ideal set of characters for a novel’s essential conflict.

In the past few months, I’ve read three good novels about different kinds of families and the ways they deal with tragedies, including murder. I recommend them all. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

9/10/2016. LOVIN’ THOSE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES

The Annapolis Bookstore

When Borders set up shop in Overland Park, Kansas, in the early 1990s, my fellow writers and I mourned for what we believed was the impending doom of our local bookstores. Some of us had relatives who ran local stores, and those shopkeepers told us they could never compete with the mega-store on price or selection of books. And for years it seemed they were right. One by one the local bookstores dropped out of existence. Things looked even bleaker a few years later when Amazon.com burst onto the Internet and began sucking up the book business. But today, the future of independent bookstores has taken on a whole new shine. Articles in prestigious publications including Time, Forbes, Salon, and The New York Times herald the news that indie bookstores are not dead. And the truth is, they’re right.

(Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

8/10/2016. INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA SCHULTHEIS, AUTHOR OF ST. BART’S WAY

One of Patricia Schultheis’s greatest strengths as a writer is her ability to examine relationships between people. She’s also very good at exploring relationships people have with expectations, rules, traditions, and other conventions of life. In her short story collection St. Bart’s Way, which I reviewed here last month, she offers a host of individuals, all trying to understand life and their role in it, particularly as it relates to others. In the interview below, Schultheis talks about how she creates these characters and how they come to inhabit her stories.

Schultheis’s other publications include her pictorial history Baltimore’s Lexington Market and numerous short stories and essays in national and international literary journals. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

7/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW: ST. BART’S WAY BY PATRICIA SCHULTHEIS

When I was a little girl, I loved riding home from my grandparents’ house with my parents after dark. It was one of the few times I was in a car at night, and I was fascinated by the lights in the windows of the houses that lined the two-lane highway that led from my hometown to my grandparents’ farm. In my child’s understanding of the world, those lights suggested warmth, a refuge from the darkness our car was plowing through. St. Bart’s Way, a collection of short stories by Patricia Schultheis, is like looking at the lights inside those windows and seeing all the way into the residents’ souls. But what’s inside is not always refuge, and what refuge there is isn’t easily earned. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

6/10/2016. CAN A MOVIE BE AS GOOD AS THE BOOK?

I love movies almost as much as I love books. And, thanks to Netflix, I watch as many of them as I can. Unfortunately, movies based on high-quality fiction rarely seem to achieve the richness of the original novels. Nevertheless, novels have become popular sources for movies. Of the eight movies nominated for the 2016 Best Picture Oscar, four were based on novels. Three of those offered stories that didn’t interest me, but I was eager to see Brooklyn. In my opinion, it was an all-right movie, but even though I haven’t read the novel, I kept thinking the novel surely offered so much more. The main character, Eilis Lacey, was appealing but not engaging. I wasn’t with her as closely as I wanted to be. I didn’t feel what she felt. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

5/29/2016. BOOK EDITOR AND REVIEWER CANDACE LEVY IS GUEST BLOGGER ON JUNE 1

Do you enjoy listening to audiobooks or are you a hard line advocate of the printed word? I’m a devoted fan of both and usually have one of each going all the time. As guest blogger on June 1, Candace Levy will tell us why she loves audiobooks and why, if you’ve never listened to one, you really should give them a try.

Levy is a full-time freelance book editor whose clients include both major publishing firms and prominent independent presses. She is also a freelance book reviewer and journalist, covering books in a wide range of genres. When she’s not at her desk, you’ll inevitably find her listening to an audiobook while cooking, walking, making lace, or taking photographs. She was honored to be the Audio Publisher Association’s Audiobook Blogger of the year for 2016. To keep track of all her bookish adventures, follow her on Twitter (@BethFishReads) or visit her blog, Beth Fish Reads.

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

5/10/2016. INTERVIEW WITH JAMES SCOTT, AUTHOR OF THE KEPT

Only a brave author would create his debut novel with characters who are different from him in almost every way. James Scott, author of The Kept, took on that challenge and compounded it with a harsh setting and even harsher themes. But as I said in my review of The Kept last month, Scott gives his characters multi-dimensional personalities that shine against the turmoil of the story. I was eager to ask him how he combined those elements so well. He shares some of his thoughts on process and inspiration below.

Scott’s previous work has been short listed for the Pushcart Prize and nominated for the Best New American Voices. He’s received awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Millay Colony, the Saint Botolph Club, the Tin House Summer Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

4/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW: THE KEPT BY JAMES SCOTT

Several years I ago I stood on a red-rock mountain in Arches National Park, Utah, and looked across a vista of severe canyons and soaring rock formations, including amazing natural arches. The land was stark, but it was beautiful. In the same way, The Kept, a novel by James Scott, is beautiful. It’s not the kind of novel that welcomes you with warmth, but it takes your breath with its incisive characterizations and the harsh realities they reveal. The characters of The Kept expose the good and bad in all of us with crystal sharp clarity.

The Kept opens with Elspeth Howell arriving at her isolated home in upstate New York after months away working as a midwife. The year is 1897, and with no access to more sophisticated transportation, Elspeth is walking through deep snow. She knows things are terribly wrong when she sees no smoke above the house’s chimney nor light in the windows. No sounds from her five children break the silence of the snow. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

3/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW—MY BRILLIANT FRIEND BY ELENA FERRANTE

When I learned that Elena Ferrante (a pen name) refused to reveal any information about herself because she believed her novels should stand on their own, I wanted to applaud. As Mark Willen explained in his post on Late Last Night Books in July, Ferrante believes that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” What a refreshing idea. I couldn’t wait to read My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy. Here’s what I found: the novel definitely stands on its own, but it’s almost as difficult to talk about as its enigmatic author. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

2/10/2016. THE GENDER BIAS BLIGHT IN NOVELS

Think about the novel you’re reading now. Is the main character or protagonist a man? If the protagonist is a man, does the story also have strong female characters and do they get a reasonable amount of time in the spotlight? If the protagonist is a woman, how are the men defined? How often are they seen? In some of the very best novels, both classic and contemporary, most of the good parts are taken over by characters of one gender or the other. In fact, the high quality of writing in some novels helps mask the disparity in gender importance. Readers just don’t notice that the most interesting characters are all men—or women. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

1/10/2016. INTERVIEW WITH JEN MICHALSKI, AUTHOR OF THE TIDE KING

In her novels, novellas, and numerous short stories, Jen Michalski writes about topics as varied as the colors of the rain. She’s tackled murder, incest, romance, loneliness, and other subjects, coming at them all from different angles and with different perspectives. In her debut novel, The Tide King, which I reviewed here last month, and her forthcoming novel, The Summer She Was Underwater, Michalski explores her subject matter with magical realism, only one of the many tools she wields so well. She was voted one of the best authors in Maryland by CBS News, one of “50 Women to Watch” by The Baltimore Sun, and “Best Writer” by Baltimore Magazine (Best of Baltimore issue, 2013). In the interview below, she talks about writing with magical realism, labeling of authors, understanding loneliness, and more. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

12/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: THE TIDE KING BY JEN MICHALSKI

Jen Michalski is a wonderful storyteller. You could read her novel The Tide King purely for the characters and events that fit in with the reality we know. One reviewer on Amazon said she’d done that, finding the eternal-life-giving herb in the story unnecessary. If you read the novel that way, you’ll be treated to a beautiful piece of writing with well-developed characters and an exciting plot, but you will miss so much.

In her guest blog, “A Jolt of Vertigo,” published on Late Last Night Books last month, Michalski said she found herself writing about the fantastic herb because “sometimes reality is too constricting.” I never thought I would be a fan of magical realism in novels because I’ve always considered myself a true realist, a person who tells it like it is in her writing and her life. But The Tide King showed me how a well-grounded magic element or event allows a story to explore the meaning of what is in ways that otherwise it never could. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

10/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW—SOMEONE BY ALICE McDERMOTT

Alice McDermott has written several highly acclaimed novels, including one that won the National Book Award and three others that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She also teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which is only about 20 miles up the road from where I live. Despite her obvious writing skill and her physical proximity, I had never read one of her novels until now. To introduce myself to her work, I chose her most recent novel, Someone, and I don’t regret my choice. Someone took me into the mind of a sensitive, yet strong, woman named Marie Commeford, who searches throughout her life to understand the line between joy and sorrow, a deep but narrow crevasse that seems to open and close at will. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

9/10/2015. THE PRIVATE AUTHOR—GOOD OR BAD?

Once upon a time authors were mysterious people, stereotyped as starving artists scratching with their pens or pecking on their typewriters in lonely garrets. William Shakespeare, for example, is a shadowy figure. We know about the times he lived in, but not a lot about him personally. The best insights we have about him lie in the words he wrote—his plays and poetry. Then came newspapers, radio, and television, and authors had the opportunity to reveal more of themselves to their readers. Today with the internet and social media, authors can share everything—in real time, even—if they want to. But as a reader, how much do you really want to know about the authors of the novels you read? And how does knowing so much affect what you think of their books? (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

8/10/2015—INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP CIOFFARI, AUTHOR OF DARK ROAD, DEAD END

Philip Cioffari’s novel Dark Road, Dead End, which I reviewed here last month, piqued my interest in illegal animal smuggling so much that I couldn’t wait to ask Cioffari how he came up with the topic and what strategies, in both research and writing, he used to make the novel so compelling. His sense of the atmosphere of southern Florida and the good and evil that battle there had me hooked on the first page. Cioffari’s answers to my questions appear below.

A multi-talented author, Cioffari has written novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His previous fiction works include Jesusville, A History of Things Lost or Broken, and Catholic Boys, all published by Livingston Press/University of West Alabama. His independent feature-length film, Love in the Age of Dion, which he wrote and directed, has won numerous film festival awards. Cioffari’s short stories have appeared in literary and commercial magazines and anthologies, and his plays have been produced off and off-off Broadway at the Chelsea Playhouse and the American Globe Theater, among others. (Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

7/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: DARK ROAD, DEAD END BY PHILIP CIOFFARI

I love a novel that teaches me about a phenomenon or a historical event. In my past two posts, I talked about The Tilted World, which introduced me to the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. This month I want to talk about another disaster that’s taking place even as I write: the smuggling of exotic and endangered animals, stolen from their natural habitats, into the United States for profit. Dark Road, Dead End, a novel by Philip Cioffari, explores the smarmy world of animal smugglers and the law enforcement officers who risk their lives trying to shut the practice down.

(Continue reading)

SALLY WHITNEY

Author of the novel Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

6/10/2015. INTERVIEW WITH TOM FRANKLIN, CO-AUTHOR OF THE TILTED WORLD

Tom Franklin’s fiction overflows with detailed characters, rich emotion, and the smoldering energy of the Deep South. I first encountered his novels with Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a marvelous story of murder and tested loyalty that was nominated for nine awards and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award.

The Tilted World, which Franklin wrote with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, is even better. In The Tilted World, Franklin and Fennelly explore the devastating consequences of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 on property and people. As I said in my review of The Tilted World last month, the authors give life to the fear, grit, and courage of the people who were there. Franklin teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Today he tells us about the novel, Mississippi, and the flood. (Continue reading)

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