Glimpses from readings:  a TV newscaster tries to film southern WV kids during the Poverty War ... a turn-of-the-century boy watches his miner father come in from the mines late at night ... a lovely sex scene... Dietrich Bonhoeffer agonizes over his decision to return to Nazi Germany.

Personal:  Born Bluefield 1951, raised in Black Wolf, McDowell County (coal town no longer in existence) till 1963, thereafter eastern Kanawha County.  Now lives in Charleston. 

Publications:  Good King Harry, Harper and Row 1984; Storming Heaven, W.W. Norton 1987; The Unquiet Earth, W.W. Norton 1992; Saints and Villains, W.W. Norton 1998; Fallam's Secret, W.W. Norton 2003.

Education and Career:  DuPont High School; BA West Virginia Wesleyan College 1973, MDiv Virginia Theological Seminary 1979. Hospital unit clerk, typist, computer operator, congressional aide, book store clerk, licensed lay Episcopal preacher, writer-in-residence West Virginia State College.

Awards:  Fellowship/National Endowment for the Arts, W.D. Weatherford Award, American Book Award, Lillian Smith Award, semi-finalist for International Dublin Literary Award, Boston Book Review Award. 

Reviewer�s Comments:
- Saints and Villains -- "A masterpiece. . . one of the handful of best books I've ever read." --- Annie Dillard
- �High drama. . . stirring adventure. . . to find a historical figure like Dietrich Bonhoeffer packaged in what is essentially a moral thriller is a surprising joy." -- The Boston Globe 
- Storming Heaven -- "Brilliant diamond-hard fiction, heart wrenching, tough and tender." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Excerpts from In Their Own Country:
Kate: You are sometimes described as an Appalachian writer. But you said you feel it's more accurate to call you a theological writer.

Denise: I think that's the thing that ties all four books together. One book is not set anywhere near Appalachia, and another book is mostly not set anywhere near Appalachia. So there are really only two of the four novels that are set in the Appalachian region. And even those deal with international and national issues and people.

The Appalachian region's never been isolated, the way the myth has it. And so there's certainly no reason why Appalachian literature should take place in isolation either. But I do think - woman writer, Appalachian writer, political writer, theological writer - the one that makes the most sense to me is that I write literature that deals with theological questions.

Denise: (speaking of the flood scene in The Unquiet Earth) It's always hard to write those scenes, the really dramatic scenes I've written, where people die. It's hard because you have to live it yourself with your characters. And usually, it comes toward the end of a book, and by that time, you've gotten to know the characters really well, and you care about them and don't want to see them go through stuff like this.

Kate: How do you work yourself up to it?

Denise: I get myself in almost a trance, I think. And at that point, I just block out the world, really. I don't sit down to write a scene like that unless I have a chunk of time where I can just not be interrupted. Same thing happened with the end of Saints and Villains. I wrote the last section, probably the last 25 pages, all in a 24-hour period, just going through it. For something that intense, you have to do that, to keep the intensity yourself.

I do feel called to write the books I write. I don't think I could write them if I didn't, because the whole process is such a mystery. It usually doesn't feel like something that I'm doing. It feels like something that's been given to me, and I'm just putting down. But it appears in my head first.

I couldn't write a book that someone assigned me. If someone said, "Sit down and write a novel about this or that," there's no way I could do that. It has to be something that's given to me.

I think that's true in a lot of people's lives. If we try to be in tune with the spiritual, then when we listen to what we should be doing, we go out and do what we're called to do.

I want to be involved in the world. No offense to Emily Dickinson, but I'm not an Emily Dickinson. I'm not interested in hiding away in my house and not being involved. I hope that the books  write are really interesting. But I want to have an interesting life too. I want to live life. I don't want to just read about it or just write about it.

Program music performed by: Bob Webb, Robin Kessinger