1967. The year Hannah Tucker was born. It was also the year Barry Hannah graduated as Arkansas’ first MFA in fiction. Although she didn’t discover the writer until her college years, she liked that connection, however thin. She felt a specialness to it, a seed. That seed bloomed in the winter of 2001 in Oxford, Mississippi where she found herself and a hundred or so others gathered in an old schoolhouse to toast the southern writer. The friends called themselves the Sons and Daughters of Barry. Through a mutual friend she’d managed to get one of her short stories to him in hopes he’d offer his thoughts. In their brief conversation that magical beer-soaked-fried-catfish night, he stood electrically close and said, “Hannah, it’s damn good! Get on with it.”
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