Small Town Girl

Jayne Anne Phillips in 1980.

Jayne Anne Phillips was a literary wunderkind who counted Sam Shepard and Jim Harrison among her fans. Her latest book revisits her childhood in rural Appalachia

By Nancy Schoenberger

Jayne Anne Phillips was just 26 when her first book of short stories, the 1976 collection Black Tickets, was published to a howl of praise. Such sudden attention can be disorienting to a young writer, but Phillips says, “From the very beginning, I paid no attention. I felt that I had to protect myself.... So in some ways I probably didn’t take advantage of it as I might have. I just ignored it.”

With influences ranging from Arthur Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs to Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O’Connor, her lush, elegiac fiction also invokes William Faulkner’s Southern READ ON