One of the things that's difficult about West Virginia is that it is a place where - a lot is extracted from here, right? Coal, lumber, now fracking for natural gas. But there's so much that's so interesting and beautiful, both in the people and the landscape. So I get asked a lot, you know, "Why not just leave West Virginia?" you know, or "Why would a character like Jodi go back to West Virginia?" And I think that for those of us who love places that are sometimes difficult to love, we love them with this extra fierceness. On what we misunderstand about West Virginia So it's the sort of love of life and determination to make something joyful out of life. I mean, she kind of looks at her the first night that they're hanging out and tells herself: "Don't do this." But at the same time she's drawn to her - I mean, she's physically attracted to her, but she's also, I think, attracted to the fact that Miranda is bound and determined to enjoy life despite everything that's going wrong. She's just gotten out of prison and she knows in many ways that taking up with Miranda is a bad decision. On when Jodi meets Miranda - a woman who has three children, a failing marriage to a has-been country singer and an addiction And so it was a process of "realizing" what she had been through. I really actually kind of felt like I was getting to know her. And then the plot and the rest of the story sort of fell into place. I started thinking about her all the time. I was hanging out with Jodi, and she kind of took up residence in my mind, and I became a little infatuated with her. Jodi came to me very strongly before I even realized that I was writing a book. And later as an adult I realized just how strong their joy was, you know, to be released - but also their fear of what it meant to make a life on the outside." I specifically remember overhearing my dad speaking with women at the Alderson prison who were soon to be released. "When I started writing Sugar Run and started realizing that my character Jodi had spent a significant amount of her life in prison, those impressions that I formed when I was young came back to me. And so as a very young child I think it was exciting to me because I got to eat candy out of the vending machines. women who hadn't received a visit from family or friends in more than a year," she says in an interview from West Virginia Public Radio.
"My dad worked for a nonprofit, and part of the work that he did is he volunteered to visit women in the federal prison camp in Alderson, W.Va. She's a visiting writer at the University of North Carolina, and a writing fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia. Sugar Run is the first novel from Mesha Maren.
Soon, she'll meet someone, and they'll try to make a life together in a small West Virginia town where they are outsiders in every way. She shot her girlfriend when she was 17, so Jodi has lived most of her life in prison, and now must make a new life in the real world that she has never known.
Mesha Maren's novel Sugar Run opens as Jodi McCarty is getting turned out of prison on parole after serving 18 years for manslaughter.
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