http://www.davidpaynebooks.com/
Acclaimed novelist David Payne’s early novels—Early From the Dance, Ruin Creek, a New York Times Notable Book and Gravesend Light — are set in the fictional Piedmont town of Killdeer, North Carolina, as well as on the Outer Banks. His most recent novel, Back to Wando Passo, takes readers to a rice plantation in the South Carolina low country, where two related love triangles — one marriage unraveling in the present day, and another shattered by the Civil War — drive toward a simultaneous crescendo of betrayal, revenge and redemption. Payne has taught writing at Duke, Bennington, Hollins and in the MFA program at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He is currently at work on a family memoir, Barefoot to Avalon, that centers on his relationship with his bipolar brother.
David led a Doe Branch Ink workshop in 2010; participants were uniformly enthusiastic about David’s teaching and mentoring and the balance of writing, reflection and engagement that Doe Branch offers.
Praise for David Payne’s Writing:
“Back to Wando Passo quivers with authentic life and is so bold in concept and audacious in scope that it seems like the summing up and exclamation point of a great writer’s career. The novel contains everything. . . .” — Pat Conroy
“I begin with what may seem a bold observation: David Payne is the most gifted American novelist of his generation. Ruin Creek is the best new novel I’ve read this year. As in Early from the Dance, he sets his literary table on the Carolina Outer Banks, a literary territory as palpable in these pages as the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck’s.” –The Dallas Morning News
“Brilliant. A defining voice for his generation.” — The Boston Globe
About the Doe Branch Ink Writers’ Retreat
I’m looking forward to my residency at Doe Branch Ink as an opportunity to explore the following questions with like-minded writers of fiction and non-fiction: What is it you suspect, fear, know about your character(s) and/ or your story that you can’t, or haven’t, brought yourself to say? (Clue: chances are it’s tied to what you suspect, fear, know and haven’t brought yourself to say about yourself.) Our week at Doe Branch Ink will be devoted to finding and saying it.
