As a child, he was a precocious oddball, as adolescent he risked rebelliousness to the edge of delinquency, as adult he bounced around the South from Louisiana to Florida and back to North Carolina. He writes about Grit Lit characters who live on the margins because he has lived that way himself.
He finally took root in Rocky Mount, where he has lived for the last twenty-eight years,
working for a local non-profit, until he retired in 2017 and began to write fiction in earnest.
“I’ve always felt like a round peg being forced to live in a square hole, so I write about those who live in the margins, the ones who are other and outside.”
Kirk writes about the binary opposites that for him construct the modern Southern experience. His humanistic fiction is centered in love of place. For him, the South is a place of wondrous beauty as well as savage ugliness, often blended together at the same time. The space in which his imagination likes to play is where traditions of hospitality clash with generational prejudices like the whiff of a hog-killing on a clear Fall day. The inspiration for his stories is as likely to come from abandoned and forgotten ethnic graveyards as it is to come from amateur straight dirt track racing out in the county. His intention for his work is to honestly express inclusion and its challenges. He believes that narrative language can dignify and advance the lives of all.
Kirk’s creative writing has appeared in The Penmen Review, the Caustic Frolic journal, and the Master’s Café online blog. He is currently a MFA candidate in SNHU’s Genre Fiction program. He anticipates that his full-length debut work, The Salvage Yard, a Grit Lit novel, will be ready in Fall 2022.
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Interesting Links…
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Confused about Southern Gothic and Grit Lit fiction? Lucinda MacKethan lays it all out in this definitive article HERE
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A great group of Southern writers – The Pamlico Writer’s Group HERE
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The North Carolina Writer’s Network HERE
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Do you have a great idea for a Halloween tale? Check out this year’s short story competition at “Haunted Pamlico” HERE