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"Growing up in a small town in North Florida, I always thought that writers lived in New York or Paris," Morris explains. "And if writers were from the south they were eccentric alcoholics who lived in run down mansions. That was really my world view at the time. My mother and I had fled an abusive household and lived in a trailer. So I never thought that writing was in the realm of possibilities for me." Morris began writing at the age of thirty-one, after he had worked as an aide to a US Senator, a salesman for a pharmaceutical company and as a public affairs manager. When his career in the pharmaceutical industry took him to North Carolina Morris discovered writers who shared a common knowledge of the rural lifestyle in which he had grown up and soon his world view began to change. "Writers like Lee Smith and Tim McLaurin had a big influence on me," Morris states. "After reading their work, I began to contemplate telling my own stories." While studying under Tim McLaurin, Morris began the story that would eventually become his first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass. A Place Called Wiregrass was released in April 2002 and received the Catherine Marshall Foundation's Christy Award for Best First Novel. A Place Called Wiregrass has been recommended by the Independent Booksellers Association as a Booksense 76 selection and included in the southern literature curriculum at three universities. Morris's second novel, Slow Way Home, was nationally ranked as one of the top three recommended books by the Independent Booksellers Association and named one of the best novels of 2003 by the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the St. Louis Dispatch. Morris is also the author of a novella based on the Grammy nominated song, Live Like You Were Dying. The novella was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. In addition, his work has appeared in Sonny Brewer's Stories From The Blue Moon Cafe II and in Not Safe, But Good II, an anthology edited by Bret Lott. A graduate of Auburn University, Morris and his wife, Melanie, reside in Alabama. |
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The
Washington Post has compared Michael Morris's work to Harper Lee, Flannery
O'Connor and to Mark Twain. But such comparisons are difficult for the
native of the rural south to accept.