In her fiction, Janet Peery presides over an elegant banquet. A writer’s writer who explores themes of flight, renewal, and remaking in the American West, she writes prose that is satisfying, varied, and delicious. Her gift is for choosing the perfect image, one that imbues flesh and landscape with a dense spiritual and psychological weight, and for arranging her sentences with a sense of timing and proportion. The tang of her characters’ personality is balanced against the rich lyricism of her language, but always with a restrained touch: there are no overly heavy sauces here. Literary without being obscure, her scenes are delightfully surprising but always gracious and hospitable: readers can count on her to provide a good chair to sit in. Peery is as deft and confident with the hard, concrete details that make a scene real as she is with the tenderness and ruthlessness at the heart of the human condition.

Some of Peery’s work is featured in Image issue 53 and issue 81. Read an excerpt by Peery here.

Biography

Janet Peery is the author of Alligator Dance, The River Beyond the World, and What the Thunder Said. A National Book Award Finalist, she has received NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award, citations in Best American Short Stories, several Pushcart Prizes, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award. Her stories appear in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Chattahoochee Review, Quarterly West, New Virginia Review, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction, Southwest Review, Southern Review, and other literary journals. She teaches in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University, and has served as guest faculty in Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program, Antioch-LA’s MFA Program, Image‘s Glen Workshop, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and as writer in residence at tribal colleges on reservations for the National Book Foundation’s American Voices Project.

Current Projects
February 2009

Lately I’ve been working on two short stories—one set in Denver in 1970 and based on my brief experience working at the Cosmopolitan Hotel (razed in 1984), and the other set in a hospital and based on an incident with a dying woman. In addition, I’m making notes for and forays into a novel tentatively titled Contagion. Set in early 20th century Wichita, a period in which an amusement park called Wonderland was in full swing on Ackerman’s Island, the novel seems to be based on the life of my great-aunt, a Red Cross nurse during both World Wars. I see as I write these story and novel descriptions that I must be mulling questions of memory, history, impermanence, age, suffering, and mortality.

Because I’m a slow writer, short stories appeal most. I’ll be lucky if I can get one finished in less than a year. I’m still drawn to longer work and so I’m not ready to say that I won’t write another novel.