On Alicia L. Conroy

In haunting ways, Alicia Conroy's "Mud-Colored Beauties of the Plains" not only recalls Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" in its sense of a mythic past beset by modern society, but it steps back a page. Conroy's story springs from the source of creation—the mud bed of "fluvial life from amid tree roots and marsh marigolds." Her fish-woman rises from her mud bed beset by an America bent on commercializing everything and everyone. Conroy's story is a dramatic, lively, and vigorous investigation of our times. This is wonderful fiction, true fiction, fiction in the finest tradition of all that fiction offers. It runs against the flow; it resists convention, makes me believe; and its many currents linger in my heart.

—Wendell Mayo, author of three books of fiction: Centaur of the North: Stories; a novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood; and B. Horror and Other Stories. He is a recent recipient of an NEA and Creative Writing Fulbright to Lithuania. He teaches at Bowling Green State University.