Meagan Lucas’s debut novel, Songbirds & Stray Dogs, tells the story of a young woman named Jolene who arrives in Flat Rock as an outsider and struggles to find her place in her new home. The book cover summarizes the story:

Jolene has spent the majority of her life living in the shadow of the pain her mother caused and trying to prove herself worthy of her aunt’s stingy love. Unintentionally pregnant and abandoned again, Jolene tries to outrun her shame by heading to the mountains of Western North Carolina. Songbirds & Stray Dogs is a Southern Story … but also a universal story of escaping the burden of your past and finding yourself home in a strange land.

Meagan Lucas has never had to face most of the problems her heroine encounters, but she certainly understands the feeling of trying to make a new home in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

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Songbirds & Stray Dogs was published in 2019 and soon attracted critical acclaim, receiving a raft of awards and accolades including:

•2020 Indie Book Awards for Best First Novel
•Bronze Medal - 2020 Readers' Favorite Award for Realistic Fiction
•Finalist - 2020 Best Book Award for Literary Fiction
•Semi-Finalist - 2020 Kindle Book Awards for Literary Fiction
•LitReactor Staff Picks: One of the Best Books of 2019

Perhaps most gratifying for Meagan is her book’s 2022 selection as North Carolina's choice for the North Carolina Humanities/Library of Congress Route 1 Read program. “The NC Humanities award probably means the most,” says Meagan, “because I am a transplant who wrote a book about how much I love North Carolina, and North Carolina is loving me back through this award.”

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Meagan grew up in Ontario, Canada in a small town on an island in Lake Huron. After high school, she set out to discover the wider world and eventually found herself married to an American and working as a middle school English teacher in Michigan. But Michigan winters were hard and career prospects were limited by the recession of 2008/9. Looking to make a new start, Meagan and her husband Josh recalled fond memories of a honeymoon in Asheville and decided to return to the mountains of western North Carolina.

When she arrived in Henderson County in 2009, Meagan Lucas found herself immersed in a new and fascinating culture - the land of blue-tinged mountains, mama’s cornbread, fried green tomatoes, and conversations punctuated with “yes ma’am, no ma’am.” Meagan enjoyed the small town friendliness but she was still something of a stranger in a strange land. Like her protagonist Jolene, Meagan Lucas had to figure out how to make a new home. “I understand that outsider feeling,” she says now. “I felt that when I first got here.”

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An avowed introvert and careful observer of the human condition, Meagan spent the next several years watching and listening to the manners, customs, and rhythm of speech in her new home. She was a young Canadian woman soaking up the culture of western North Carolina like a sponge. Although she didn’t know it at the time, much of what she absorbed would eventually be wrung out in the form of her first published novel. “I’ve been here for 15 years now. I know these people. These are the people at the grocery store and the car line at school.” Somewhat ironically, Meagan has lived here long enough that she feels it is easier to write about her life in the mountains than to write about her childhood in Canada.

Though Ontario and North Carolina would seem to be two wildly different worlds, Meagan found many deep-rooted connections between her old and new homes. Both her childhood home and Henderson County were rural in nature and the attitudes of the people living in those communities shared many similarities. “I see that same sense of independence here,” she explains. “The desire to not be attached to the government and a hesitancy to trust establishment. All combined with deep religious roots.”

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Meagan with daughter Brodie, husband Josh, son Redding, and favorite pug dog, Flint.

As is often the case, the first step on her journey to writing a novel began with a life challenge that altered her sense of self. In 2011, Meagan and Josh welcomed their daughter Brodie to the world. The excitement of being a new mother, however, soon gave way to the pernicious condition of postpartum depression. Meagan found herself struggling and looking for a way out of the gray fog that had suddenly shrouded her world. The former English teacher turned to writing as a means of self-therapy to find her way out of the shadows of depression. “Writing really helped,” says Meagan. “It is interesting how many writers use their craft as a coping mechanism - either to understand themselves or to understand this world.”

Meagan began to write in earnest via “mommy blogging.” When her son Redding was born and life was especially busy, blogging was a way to reconnect with people, and to be honest about her experience with postpartum depression and the many challenges of motherhood. The response to her writing was both positive and encouraging. Eventually, however, Meagan began to feel the limits of personal blogging. “I was writing about people that I love and I realized that maybe that’s not fair. I’m allowed to show my own dirty laundry but maybe I don’t want to expose everyone else’s.”

Meagan decided to explore short fiction as a place that would give her the latitude to write about her experiences and the people she knew without compromising anyone’s privacy. “In a way, short fiction allows me to get to a bigger truth by fudging some of the details of my experience. I enjoy playing with that.” Short fiction was also an important entree to the wider literary community as she began connecting with other writers and was being noticed by the editors reading and publishing her short stories.

Encouraged by the response to her short fiction, Meagan resolved to take the next big step - to write a novel. Her first attempt, however, turned out to be less of a literary success and more of a hard-knocks learning experience. “I wrote a really terrible first novel. Every scene took place in a car,” she recalls now with a laugh. The experience, however frustrating at the time, was a critical step in her evolution to becoming an author. “Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours of mastery. I had to put in my 10,000 hours.” She adds, “I think that is the biggest lesson for any writer. You will do an astronomical amount of work before anybody can really read your work.”

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Chastened but undeterred by her initial foray into the world of novel writing, the ever observant Meagan found the genesis of her next novel one morning at Black Bear Coffee in downtown Hendersonville. Sitting alone at a table and writing - always writing— Meagan overhead a serious conversation at the table behind her. A young girl was telling her boyfriend that she was unexpectedly pregnant. The boy denied being the father and was stepping away from any responsibility for the unborn child.

That vignette of life in a small southern town struck a chord with Meagan. “I had two small children at home and all I could think about was how hard her life was going to be. I have a great husband and it is still really hard.” Memories of that moment found a permanent home in Meagan’s consciousness and she soon realized it was a story she would have to write.

That snippet of overheard conversation, combined with a favorite Ray LaMontagne song about disappointment in love called “Jolene”, gave birth to the heroine in Meagan’s next foray into novel writing. Armed with her hard-earned 10,000 hours of previous writing, the experience of motherhood, and a decade of living and observing in the South, Meagan embarked on her next literary quest - Songbirds & Stray Dogs. It was a journey that was to last for the next two years.

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The story of Jolene, although not autobiographical, does find its foundation in the author’s life story. Meagan grew up in a conservative church and when a pregnant Jolene is kicked out of her house by her religious aunt it was a familiar scenario from Meagan’s youth. Meagan also sees her own proclivity for self-protection by serving others in her heroine. “If you know the author and you read the book you are always going to find those kinds of threads,” Meagan says.

Meagan describes her chosen literary genre as “Grit Lit.” Although it is hard to find a single simple definition via a Google search, it is variously described as “contemporary writing about the Rough South” or “stories of the hardscrabble south without romanticism or false nostalgia.” As one reviewer writes, Grit Lit is a representation of the south “not through moonlight and magnolia, but moonshine and Marlboros.”

More broadly, Grit Lit is a subset of Literary Fiction that typically places more emphasis on developing character, theme, and language and somewhat less on the plot. “Literary Fiction gets a slightly stodgy high school English teacher sort of reputation,” explains Meagan. “Grit Lit takes that idea and dirties it up a little bit.”

With Songbirds, Meagan is trying to find a balance between character development and advancing the plot. “I hope that it is interesting on a book-length plot level but that it is also interesting on a sentence level. I like it when readers pull out one of my sentences and say, “This is a beautiful sentence.” Meagan also wants you to care enough about her characters to cry. “I want you to fall in love with these characters and cry at the end of the book. Really it is crying that I want you to feel.”

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As honest in real life as she is in her novel, Meagan admits that her chosen profession is unlikely to be highly lucrative - at least in terms of money. “None of the money part matters to me. I want to create a connection with the reader. I want other people to discover this thing that I’ve discovered.” She expresses a preference that her readers love the book, of course, but if they don’t she still hopes they will want to talk about it.

Meagan currently has a second novel in the works and continues to learn and grow as a young writer. Her experiences over the course of the last decade put her in a position to offer several pieces of real-world advice to prospective writers. “One of the burdens of writers is self-consciousness, you have to write like nobody is going to read it and then,” she adds, “edit like everybody is going to read it.” She also highlights a willingness to be vulnerable as another trait of a successful writer. “I need to be honest on the page so that the reader feels it. I need to make myself cry so that I can make you cry.”

Another important trait for a writer and a stumbling block for many would-be writers is tenacity. Or as Meagan describes it, finding enough “butt-glue” to sit at the keyboard and get the writing done. When her children were very young, she would write from 4:30 to 6:30 in the morning. In the dark dawn hours Meagan “sat there and waited for the muse to come.”

Finally, Meagan’s most important lesson for aspiring writers is as simple as it is difficult. Go out and live life. “Get your heart broken a bunch of times,” she offers. “Then you will have something interesting to write about. The more that you live and the longer you live the more interesting your writing becomes.”

Songbirds & Stray Dogs is about second chances. Understanding that finding home and family - whatever that means to you - is always possible. Even in the places you least expect it. For Meagan Lucas that new home is here in western North Carolina and her book is an homage to her adopted home state. “I consider Songbirds & Stray Dogs to be a love song to North Carolina,” she says. And then adds with the heart of a Tar Heel, “A love song to the beauty of its geography, and the tenacity and kindness of its people.”

Learn more about Meagan Lucas at http://meaganlucas.com/

You can also join Meagan Lucas for a virtual conversation about her book and career on August 9th …

North Carolina Humanities invites you to attend a virtual book conversation with Meagan Lucas and fellow North Carolina-based author Ron Rash on August 9, 2022 at 6:30 pm. Meagan and Ron will spend an hour talking about Songbirds and Stray Dogs, their writing processes, and Appalachian literature. This event is free and is hosted on Zoom. Registration is required.

Register Here