news-record.com

Writer Holly Goddard Jones believes it's difficult finding readers who are interested in fiction these days.

The Internet, video games, movies and TV occupy people's lives, leaving few who read books in their spare time. But of those few, even fewer are interested in reading anything beyond nonfiction or memoirs, Jones says.

"That's what makes me sad because I think people would enjoy a novel very much if they got beyond this idea that it has to be 'true' to be valid," Jones says. "I think fiction is bigger truth."

Readers in search of this bigger truth can find it in "Girl Trouble," Jones' collection of short stories released by Harper Perennial in September.

With eight short stories, Jones shines an unflinchingly honest light on the lives of characters living in or around Roma, a fictional town in Kentucky. Jones grew up in the state and taught classes at Murray State University before joining UNCG's creative writing department in fall 2009.

She now has an office across the hall from Michael Parker, a novelist and fellow teacher and writer. But Jones says she does most of her own creative writing at the kitchen table of her house, a cozy brick home a few miles from campus, which she shares with her husband, Brandon, and their two dogs.

"Actually, my best writing sessions weirdly were sitting in my mother-in-law's kitchen while she and Brandon were watching TV and hanging out," Jones says. "I wrote, at one session, eight or nine pages, which is a pretty good haul for me.

"I did that over a few days, and then I was exhausted, and I didn't write again for a week."

The self-described "tender-hearted" author, who studied journalism at Western Kentucky University, began her career in fiction when she switched her major to English.

"I was at Western Kentucky University for a year, I got married, and we transferred to (the University of Kentucky) together," Jones says. "And I think because I did this big adult thing, I felt like I was entitled to not be practical in other respects, and that was when I became an English major and decided to take other classes."

After she graduated, Jones went on to pursue a master's degree in creative writing at Ohio State University. Her work has since appeared in several literary journals and was even selected for "New Stories From the South" in 2007 and 2008 (Algonquin Books) and "The Best American Mystery Stories" in 2008 (Mariner Books), all of which led to the publication of "Girl Trouble."

"Not in terms of biographical data is this (book) me, but if you want to see my darkest insights into what I think it is to be human or the thoughts that I would keep close to the vest otherwise, they're here," Jones says.

With "Girl Trouble," five of Jones' eight narrators, or main characters, are men. They include Jacob, a gun shop owner and a widower whose only son committed a horrible crime; Theo, a high school women's basketball coach who also committed a crime; and Ben, a young boy whose well-meaning father thinks the best way to handle his son's potential blindness is to, well, you'll just have to read for yourself.

Jones says most of her characters come from bits and pieces gleaned from people she knew or heard about while growing up in Russellville, Ky. She says the desire to write about male characters was a challenging shortcut to her goal to create characters that exist outside herself.

"It's very liberating to try and write outside of one's own gender," Jones says. "I think it's because I'm not interested in writing me so much. I'd rather go into points of view really different from my own."

Jones sees the next challenge for her creative writing as focusing less on small-town characters, like the people she knew when she was young, and creating stories that reflect the more "bourgeois" life she now knows.

"I'm not affluent by any means -- my washer and dryer are right beside of my refrigerator -- but I do live differently than the way I grew up," Jones says. "I eat differently, I drink differently, I experience culture differently, but I seem to be stuck for now writing about my previous life."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com