My name is C. Robin Jordan, and I am the product of growing up in Appalachia during the late 1960s and 1970s. Currently, I live in Brownsville, Kentucky where I work for the USDA-Forest Service Job Corps. I am attached to Great Onyx Civilian Conservation Center at Mammoth Cave as a Liaison Specialist.
My interest in fiction began early in my life, but I did not begin writing commercially until I was a staff writer for the Sparta Expositor in Sparta, Tennessee in the late 1990s. While there, I realized writing was my calling; however, I did not understand the fiction process. Ultimately, I received my bachelor’s degree in English from Tennessee Technology University in 2005, which is the same year I began working on Sunday’s Corners. The story was born from a fragment of a dream where a woman was wearing clothes from the 1940s, but she was getting off a derelict Greyhound in the South of the 1960s. From there, Ruby Rose was born. In 2009, I entered the University of Nebraska as a graduate student in their Creative Writing Program. As a graduate student, I began to see the “gaps” in Sunday’s Corners’ storyline. With guidance from mentors, I rewrote the story by adding characters and redeveloping the plot. In essence, I wrote Sunday’s Corners twice.
During one of my residencies at UNO, I was telling a fellow a story about an old man with a crooked finger. My friend wanted to know why the fellow had a crooked finger. Lovelady Road sprang from that chance conversation. Lovelady Road came to me so much easier than Sunday’s Corners because my grandfather was a moonshiner. Furthermore, I do have relatives who go to the funerals of people they do not know just to see who shows up, and my brother did build an apartment inside of a barn. With Lovelady Road, I pulled scenes from the stories my parents told me while I was growing up in Appalachia or people I know firsthand. It took me four years to be write Sunday’s Corners, but I wrote Lovelady Road in less than one!
I now have two complete novels, and I am already planning the next one. It will be entitled Even in Sometime. I tentatively have the story in my mind and a few words on the page.
