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Campus News/On Campus
On a winter's morning in 1991, Tom Bailey, associate professor of English and creative writing, was driving to his first teaching job at Cortland College in upstate New York. He was traveling a snow-covered stretch of Interstate 81 when he heard a disquieting radio report about a hunting accident. A father had accidentally shot and killed his son during the first day of buck season. When he realized what he’d done, the man turned the gun on himself.
This was Bailey’s initial encounter with the story that would evolve into his first novel, The Grace That Keeps This World. For more than a decade, he explored the questions raised by that news report. Who was this father? Why would his gut reaction be to turn the gun on himself? What did this reaction say about the kind of man he was?
The questions lingered in Bailey’s mind for a year and a half before he sat down at a keyboard and started writing “Snow Dreams,” the Pushcart Prize-winning
short story from which the novel grew. “The idea for the story came as a situation, a news report on the radio,” Bailey wrote in a May 2005 column for The Writer. “The impetus to write was driven by the questions I had about the father, my need to know who he was and why he’d done what he’d done.”
Slated for publication in October by Random House’s Crown Publishing Group as a Shaye Areheart book, The Grace That Keeps This World is a tale of tragedy, survival and strong family ties. Random House touts the novel as “an emotional page-turner infused with a deep sense of foreboding (that) perfectly captures the enduring rhythms of life in a rural town.”
Set on the edge of the Adirondack wilderness, the novel is alternately narrated by members of the Hazen family and their neighbors in Lost Lake. The Grace That Keeps This World will also be available as an audio book, which Bailey traveled to Los Angeles, Calif., this summer to record. Tom Bailey will give a public reading on
campus on Sunday, October 30, 2005, and planning is underway by his publisher for a tour to accompany his book’s release. Information on upcoming events will be posted here as it becomes available. Tom Bailey is an associate professor of English and creative writing with The Writers’ Institute in Susquehanna University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. Prior to accepting the Winifred and Gustave Weber Professorship in the Humanities at Susquehanna, which he held from 1999 to 2001, he taught in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University and at the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
In addition to The Grace That Keeps This World, Bailey is the author of Crow Man Stories (Etruscan Press, 2003), which includes “Snow Dreams,” as well as the editor of On Writing Short Stories (2000) and the author of A Short Story Writer’s Companion (2001), both from Oxford University Press. He counts among numerous recognitions and awards for his writing The Distinguished Dissertation Award for the Humanities from Binghamton University, a Newhouse Award from the John Gardner Foundation, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. Bailey is also a regular contributor to The Writer magazine.
Random House will follow up the debut of The Grace That Keeps This World this October by publishing Bailey’s second novel, Cotton Song, in the fall of 2006. Bailey is currently at work on his third novel, tentatively titled Sunny Hills. He lives in Selinsgrove with his wife, Sarah LeWine, and three children.
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