I grew up on a farm in southern Indiana, where my brothers, sister and I learned to drive tractors when we were still in grade school. We helped our dad milk cows, plow fields, bale hay, and pick corn and tomatoes for sale at the roadside. I was never a fan of this hard, sweaty labor, preferring to work inside, where I learned to bake and sew from my mom and then proudly exhibited my blue-ribbon creations at the annual 4-H fair. Many years later, some of these experiences would show up in my first novel, Stray Voltage. But my first love was journalism.
In high school, because I needed an extracurricular activity and excelled in English (certainly not math), I applied to work on the student newspaper. I became editor and attended a two-week summer journalism workshop at Ball State University, where I met kids from urban schools who dazzled me with their worldly wit and talent. On scholarship, I enrolled at Ball State and majored in journalism, dreaming of life beyond the farm and, one day, working in a big city.
But first, after graduation and marriage, I got a job as City Hall reporter at the Middletown Journal in southwest Ohio. It wasn’t exactly a metropolis, but it allowed me the space to make mistakes on a smaller scale while I learned the art of interviewing, taking detailed notes and writing on deadline. Four years later, two of my articles—about a Miss America from Middletown and about survivors of a disastrous supper club fire in the region—got me noticed by editors at the Cincinnati Enquirer.
When I walked into the Enquirer’s grand Art Deco building on my first day, I felt like the hat-flinging heroine, Mary Richards, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I spent ten great years there before moving to the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, which was about to win the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for public service. I stayed at the Observer for 30 years, covering health and medicine, and in 2013, I was part of a team of reporters named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Our series, called “Prognosis: Profits,” looked at how nonprofit hospitals actually generate large profits and contribute to the high cost of health care.
The Observer was the perfect place for someone like me, looking to become a better writer. For a time, we had an editor whose sole job was to help reporters improve their craft. He and other editors and many incredibly talented colleagues spurred me to try new things. Eventually, in addition to daily news and features, I began writing narrative nonfiction, published over consecutive days like chapters of a book.
For example, in 1997, I wrote a series about a teenage basketball player who collapsed on the court and about his family’s struggle with the question of whether to end life support. Later, I tackled a more challenging project, “Vernon’s Goodbye,” that covered the final four months of life for a 65-year-old man who declined cancer treatment and chose to die at home with hospice care, surrounded by his family. In 2010, another series called “99 Minutes” chronicled the journey of a young couple who made the wrenching decision to bring to term a baby with anencephaly even though they knew she would die shortly after birth.
When I retired from the Observer in 2017, I finally had time to switch gears and concentrate on fiction. For years, I’d been scribbling notes during beach vacations and writing scenes of a future novel during weekly sessions with writer friends. Around this time, Charlotte Center for Literary Arts began offering a program called Authors Lab with the goal of helping people write novels and memoirs. I appreciated that name because, when I was accepted as a student in 2020, it gave me permission to finally call myself “author” without feeling like an imposter. With my old notes as a starting point, I began to seriously work on my book, set in a southern Indiana community like the one where I grew up and based loosely on the experience of a friend and his dairy herd.
Through lectures and one-on-one critiques, Authors Lab taught me how to create compelling characters, plot tension-filled scenes and write realistic dialogue. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, our classes went virtual that first year, and I did most of my writing while sitting on the backyard deck with my MacBook in my lap. I gave up three-hour lunches with friends and afternoon movie dates with my husband to focus on bringing my main character, Hillie, and her farm world to life.
In 2024, when I felt my manuscript was ready to share, I began pitching to agents, and I also entered two literary contests, The Petrichor Prize and The Plaza Literary: First Chapter Prize, hoping they might help me get published. Not only did I make the longlist for both prizes, I won the Petrichor Prize and the chance to be published by Regal House Publishing. I had to smile when I signed the contract with my name in the first paragraph: Karen Garloch (hereinafter called the “Author”).
Yes, I really am.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Karen Garloch’s Stray Voltage in 2026.
