Ann McMan (born July 27)
From her early days, growing up on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, Ann McMan found creative ways to exercise her gift for fiction. Her first literary endeavors were modest--mostly confined to aphorisms scrawled on cracked pavement with colored chalk.
"FREE UPPER VOLTA!"
But as the years passed and her skills increased, she branched out into literary nonfiction--best exemplified by the abstracts that follow.
"Please excuse Ann from gym this week; she has contracted a virulent case of Norwegian Scabies."
Sometimes, the performances were less effective.
"Please excuse Ann from this week's field trip to the IXL Cottage Cheese Creamery. She is suffering from acute bouts of ague and malaria--which, combined, render it impossible for her to travel by bus."
[Ann was unaware that outbreaks of malaria were extremely rare in the Allegheny Mountains. Four days in after-school detention helped her cultivate a greater appreciation for the rigors of research.]
College at an indifferent liberal arts institution taught Ann that understanding subject/verb agreement was not enough to secure her fame and fortune. After graduation, she got a job driving a young adult bookmobile--and spent her days piloting the great rig across the dusty back roads of rural North Carolina. Her duties included making certain that the mobile library always contained at least six copies of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, visiting the county juvenile detention unit (it was a great way to catch up with her brothers), and showing public service films about safe sex to pre-teens at 4-H Clubs all across her part of "The New South."
Soon, the allure of higher education coaxed Ann back to school. For the past three decades, Ann has worked at a succession of premier institutions, designing marketing and advancement materials that promote, promulgate, and extol the benefits of indifferent liberal arts education.
Somebody has to do it.
All this time, she continued to write. And when, at the ripe old age of thirty, she realized that she was not like other girls, the great world of lesbian literature opened its arms, and provided her with a safe haven in which to grow and learn about her new identity. She will forever be indebted to those literary pioneers who had the courage, the talent, and the temerity to gift us all with an art form of our own. Ann's first and subsequent attempts at writing lesbian fiction have been heartfelt attempts to pay that great gift forward.
Her themes are absolutely timeless--they are built around the things that make the world go 'round, like love, money, and modern class distinctions. She writes to what we all respect: the genuine, the authentic, and the deserving. Yet she mocks those things that we all despise, like the affected, the pretentious, and the malicious. Ann McMan wields a metaphorical church key that opens up a world that is broader than two women in love, richer than a small cadre of supporting characters, and more colorful than her colloquial dialogue. She is smart, funny, and unapologetic in her prose, and has the confidence never to talk down to her readers. And, because she understands that for women, the romantic hope and even fantasy that lives inside each and every one of us is a reality that complicates and colors life to an astonishing degree.
As an author, Ann isn't afraid to give voice to cruelty, exploitation of the vulnerable, and soul-deep suffering, but she is remorseless about any kind of falseness, in feeling, or manner or conduct. Women and men who try to be what they are not get skewered within in her pages, held up for ridicule such that they condemn themselves out of their very own mouths. And all of them, through her deliberately expansive domestic circles, are metaphors for those things we all recognize in our own everyday lives, no matter where or how we live.
Ann McMan is the author of four novels, JERICHO, DUST, AFTERMATH, and HOOSIER DADDY--and the story collection SIDECAR. She released the holiday omnibus collection, THREE in December of 2012,
She is currently writing BACKCAST, the further adventures of the CLIT-Con 13 from SIDECAR's "Bottle Rocket, and PATRIARCH, the third book in the JERICHO series.
Ann won a Golden Crown Literary Society Award for SIDECAR in 2013, and has been named a finalist in the Lesbian Romance category of the 2014 Lambda Literary Awards for HOOSIER DADDY.
Sidecar won a 2012 Rainbow Award as Best Lesbian Contemporary General Fiction.
Further Readings:
Sidecar by Ann McMan
Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company (June 2, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1934452769
ISBN-13: 978-1934452769
Amazon: Sidecar
Amazon Kindle: Sidecar
A fast, funny, and wholly satisfying compilation of short stories filled with the same rich detail, witty humor, jagged verbal jousting, and joyous intellectual tête-à-tête that are Ann McMan's calling cards. Reconnect with Syd, Maddie, and the Jericho gang in "V1: A Valentine's Day Odyssey," as a sweet and simple gesture of love ignites a conflagration that could destroy friends, lovers, and a professional-grade mixer named Gloria. Meet Kate Winston, Shawn Harris, and the best, brightest, and most uniquely "gifted" personalities in contemporary lesfic, in the all-new novella, Bottle Rocket. Grace and Abbie screw up the courage to let themselves go for one magical night-only to find that the Fates are cheeky little bitches with a wicked sense of humor in "Falling from Grace." Take flight with Poe's celebrated raven in "Nevermore!" as two improbable coworkers, Diz and Clarissa, find friendship and maybe a bit more in a comic holiday romp set to the dulcet tones of Enya. Features a foreword by The Rainbow Reader's Salem West. Sidecar carries a bounty of fun, a bit of pathos, and a few fine wine recommendations.
More Rainbow Awards at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, Rainbow Awards/2012
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