Ann Pancake’s first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Counterpoint 2007), was one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007, won the 2007 Weatherford Prize, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground (University Press of New England, 2001), won the 2000 Bakeless award She has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers, and New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. A new story collection, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in February 2015.
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Given GroundStoriesFrom"Ghostless"
That night my daddy came in my room and sat the edge of my bed with his back to me, his long-john shirt whitening a space in the dark. He told me that had been no man at all, but a ghost, a Confederate soldier, and I stiffened in my iron bed. Here was thick with ghosts, he told me, and told me not to be afraid, but I was, that the first one I ever saw and me maybe four years old. After he left I cried with the blanket up over my head, listening for those ghost boots slapping up the stairs.
Given Ground:Stories -
Given GroundStoriesFrom"Jolo"
She knows no more at that point about Jolo’s part in the recent fires than she knows why Jolo has chosen her, this last a daily source of stun. Although she does understand, a thick, thick knowledge, why she’s drawn to him. Jolo boy. With his chest ribbed like corduroy and his melted ear, his stomach and arm skin lit like glare on the river. At first it was a prickle, then a pull. Then like how hard it is to look away when the nurse’s needle enters your arm. Then, gradually, Connie learned, and, yes, it was still the skin, the rosebud ear, like a brand-new animal for Connie to handle…
Given Ground:Stories -
Given GroundStoriesFrom"Sister"
You know about milksnakes, don’t ya? my grandma said.
I knew they thieved milk, sucked cows’ tits before the farmer got up in the morning. I’d seen one in our town shed, even barn-colored it was. Colored like dried cow shit walked to a powder.
Milksnakes’ll witch ye. Instermints of Satan.
A bead of red candied saliva globed up in the corner of her mouth.
Given Ground:Stories
“Ann Pancake's fine, ambitious first novel is about something simple: what it's like to live below a mountaintop-removal strip mine . . . [Pancake] makes her point in Strange as This Weather Has Been in a powerful, sure-footed and haunting way: People aren't dirt. But they know when they're being treated like dirt, whether in the Lower Ninth Ward or the hills of West Virginia.” —Jack Pendarvis, The New York Times
“It is a novel beautiful in its sense that this time we may have finally ruined the eternal renewal of spring. It is a novel painted with the desperate autumn colors of an old earth . . . Pancake's novel shows how hard it will be for our children to face what we've spent so long refusing to see, which, I suppose, is why the phrase strange as this weather has been doesn't end, but instead just trails off.” —Jonathan Crimmins, The Stranger [on Strange as This Weather Has Been]
"Ann Pancake . . . is indisputably a regional writer, but her stories are free from the kitschy sentimentality and high-art self-consciousness that this label has come to imply. Pancake shares [her characters'] fondness for what ordinarily appears unlovable, depicting an ignored pocket of the country with a clear and admiring eye. She has an unusual gift for portraying difficult lives with a plain-spoken accuracy that makes them seem suddenly exceptional." —The New York Times Book Review [on Given Ground]
Selected Works
