Margaret McMullan
Major Works
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Photo
right courtesy of Margaret McMullan
Margaret McMullan:
A Biography
Margaret McMullan was born in Newton County, Mississippi, and
moved with her family at the age of ten to Chicago. She is now
an English professor and chair of the department at the University
of Evansville, Indiana. McMullan earned a Bacheolor's degree
in Religious Studies from Grinnell College and her M.F.A. in
fiction from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She now
lives in Evansville with her husband Patrick O'Connor and their
son James. The three of them have published an article in an
issue of National Geographic for Kids.
 McMullan's
first novel, When Warhol Was Still Alive,
was published by Crossing Press in 1994, and her second novel,
In My Mother's House, was published
by Picador (September 9, 2004). She also co-wrote (with her
husband Pat) the film Sacred Hearts. In
addition, she has written three young adult novels: How
I Found the Strong (2004), When I
Crossed No-Bob (2007), and Cashay,
which will be released
April 6, 2009. Her essays and short stories have appeared in
Glamour (where she was an associate
entertainment editor), the Chicago Tribune, Southern
Accents, the Indianapolis Star, TriQuarterly,
Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, The Southern
California Anthology, Other Voices, Boulevard, Ploughshares.
and in A Very Southern Christmas: Holiday Stories
from the South's Best Writers.
McMullan has been the recipient of various honors and awards.
In 2005 she won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters
Award for Fiction and the Southwestern Indiana's Arts Council
Award for Artist of the Year. She received a Special Mention
in the 2005 Pushcart Prize collection, and twice she received
the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission
and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was the 2007 Eudora
Welty Visiting Writer at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.
McMullan's young adult book,  How
I Found the Strong, won the 2006 Award for Fiction
from the Mississippi Library Association, the 2004 Indiana Best
Young Adult Book of Fiction, and was named an ALA 2005 Notable
Social Studies Book. It was voted a "Great Book" by
the state of Maryland Book Consortium and chosen as Evansville,
Indiana's, First Youth Selection for the 2004 One Book/One Community
reading program. The work was also selected as one of two books
to represent Indiana on the American Library Association's "Many
Voices, One Nation" booklist. It was also named a Booklist's
Top Ten First Novel for Youth.
When Warhol Was Still Alive, McMullan's
first novel, is set in the mid-80's in Manhttan. The main character
is a poorly paid, single woman named Catherine, whose job it
is to compile and edit the entertainment page for a women's
magazine. Other characters include a bisexual man, her boss,
Fran, and Andy Warhol-obsessed, gay Joey, who develops AIDS
and dies. Her second novel, In My Mother's House,
was published in 2003.
Although it is a fictional story, it was inspired by
her maternal great-grandmother and the story
moves from pre-World War II Austria to the United States a generation
later. The novel is the story of a daughter’s desire to
understand her mother’s silence about their family’s
experiences in Vienna during World War II.
How I Found the Strong: A Story of the Civil War
is McMullan's first young adult novel. It is a
coming-of-age story set in Mississippi during and after the
Civil War and tells the story of Frank and others caught up
in the bloody battles around them. Eleven-year-old Frank would
like to join his father and older brother in the Confederate
army, but he must stay at home with Ma, his grandparents, and
Buck, the family's slave. McMullan uses family stories, a relative's
war diary, and the first-person narrative of Frank to tell the
story. The book is dedicated to her father, James McMullan,
and her son, James O'Connor, who is now eleven. The book has
received rave reviews. Booklist says
that the book is "one of the best of the many recent books
about young people in the South caught up in the bloody conflict."
McMullan's second young adult novel When I Crossed
No-Bob is a sequel to How I Found
the Strong. No-Bob is the name of a wood where
Addy O'Donnell and her no-good family live. Addy is abandoned
by her mother, and Frank Russell and his new bride take Addy
in. In this coming-of-age story, Addy must find the courage
to do what's right.
A third young adult novel (Cashay)
will be published in 2009.
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Interview with
Margaret McMullan (October,
2008)
Where and when were you born? Do you have any siblings?
I was born in 1960 in Newton, Mississippi. I have
one sister, Carlette.
What are your parents' names? What can you tell us about
them?
My father James McMullan was born in Lake, Mississippi and later
went into
business with his father in Newton. My mother, Madeleine was
born in Vienna, Austria. She met my father in Washington, D.C.
at a dinner party.
Is your husband also a writer or what does he do?
My husband Pat O'Connor is a screenwriter and a fiction writer.
He sold a screenplay to Steven Spielberg and has worked on several
films and other screenplays. Right now he owns his own advertising
and marketing business called o’connor/creative.
What author do you think has influenced you the most?
The authors who influence me the most are the ones I keep going
back to, namely Shakespeare and Faulkner.
Why did you decide to write a young adult novel with the
Civil War as its setting? Where do you get your ideas for your
books?
The decision to write How I Found the Strong
was not entirely my own. One year, the week before Thanksgiving,
my grandmother called us all down to Newton so that she could
say goodbye because she knew she was dying. She reminded me
of a shoebox in her closet. In the shoebox was a 60-page manuscript.
Her great-great uncle, Frank Russell, had talked out his life
to a secretary who typed it all down. He had lived before, during,
and after the Civil War, but he never talked about the war at
all in those 60 pages. After my grandmother’s funeral,
I couldn’t stop thinking about Frank Russell – his
voice, his life, and all the white spaces in that manuscript,
the parts of his life that he left out. That’s what I
decided I had to write. It felt as though my grandmother had
given me an assignment, and I felt closer to her as a result.
When did you become interested in writing? Was there something
in particular that got you interested?
When we moved from Mississippi to the Chicago area, I was in
the fourth grade. Back then, people didn’t move around
as much as they do now. My classmates heard my accent and made
fun of me. A lot. So I grew very quiet. That’s when I
started taking notes. I made a little notebook out of notebook
paper and colored yarn and recorded the weather, my overly dramatic
feelings, what people said, everything. Writing became a habit.
Once my sister stole this notebook and read funny sections of
it out loud to me and then to my parents. I was mad at first,
but then I saw that they were entertained. After that, I started
reading to them from my notebook. Years later, in high school,
I won a prize from Scholastic Magazine
for a story called “Bees.” I got $50 and a gold
pen with my name on it. I was officially hooked.
What kind of student were you in high school?
I was a spacey student. I was terrible at math and I wish I
had read more. I loved science, but I wasn’t particularly
good at taking tests. I had no intention of staying in the Midwest…which
of course landed me in the Midwest for college.
How
long did it take you to write How I Found the Strong?
Are the characters based on real people?
It took me about one year to write How I Found the
Strong,-- the quickest I’ve ever written
anything. I spent five years researching and writing In
My Mother’s House. “Shanks”
is based on my idea of what my grandmother’s great-great
uncle Frank Russell would have been like as a boy. The other
characters are made up characters, compilations of people I’ve
known. Buck is quiet and a lot like I was when we moved away
from Mississippi.
Are you working on a new book right now? What is it about?
I'm working on two new books. One is a collection of stories
about a family after Hurricane Katrina destroys their town
and home. The other book, a book for young adults, is about
a 14 year old girl and her mother living in Jackson in 1962,
the year before “Freedom Summer.”
Have you received awards for your writing not mentioned
above?
When I Crossed No-Bob was named
a 2008 Parents’ Choice Silver Honor, a 2007 School Library
Journal Best Book, a 2008 finalist for the Willie Morris Prize
for Southern Fiction, a Kliatt Editors' choice: best of the
year's hardcover YA fiction, Winner 2008 Mississippi Institute
of Arts & Letters Award for Fiction, Winner Indiana Best
Young Adult Book of Fiction 2008, a New England Children’s
Bookselling Advisory Council Top 10 Title, a Mississippi Press
Book Pick for 2007, a 2008 Honor book, Horace Mann Upstanders
Book Award, Antioch University (L.A.); and nominated for 2009
Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association.
Do you have any advice for future writers?
Get out, be curious about everybody and everything, travel
and take notes, and read, read, read.
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Related
Websites
This
web page is Margaret McMullan's home page.
Read
the short story Snake Oil by McMullan in the fall 2007
issue of Ploughshares, The Literary
Magazine of Emerson College.
Read
Chapter One of When I Crossed No-Bob
on Houghton Mifflin's web page.
Amazon.com
posts reviews of In My Mother's House
and the Prologue to the book.
Information
about the screen play, Sacred Hearts,
for which McMullan was writer and co-producer.
Review
on the Blog: Jew Wishes for In My Mother’s
House by Margaret McMullan
Brief
excerpt from When I Crossed No Bob
and readers' reviews on Amazon.
Editorial
reviews for How I Found the Strong
Reviews
for When Warhol Was Alive
Information
about McMullan's to-be-published book called Cashay
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Works
Cited
McBain, Roger. "Strong" Family Ties Give Life
to McMullan's Civil War Book. University of Evansville:
Faculty News. April 29, 2004. (Reprinted from Evansville
Courier & Press)
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