Flumes Volume 2: Issue 1, Summer 2017 | Page 70

"Oh, Honey"

An Interview with Dorothy Allison,

By Jodi Gwendolyn Hernandez

I was introduced to Dorothy Allison’s, Bastard Out of Carolina, in a creative writing class the fall of 2015. One of our assignments involved reading works and writing criticism. It was suggested I read Dorothy Allison, because my writing was taking an interesting direction toward memoir and creative non- fiction. When I read the novel, I could not put it down. I was crying, I was yelling at the book and I was livid with Bone’s mother. I had so many young women in my life who had experienced what Bone had by the hands of men their mothers had brought into their lives. The story left me inflamed and impassioned to tell the stories that I knew. Stylistically, I wanted to rip out people’s hearts and trample them beneath my feet with my writing, too.

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Dorothy on a Motorcycle, 1992, Jill Posener