publications.
about.
I'm Thatcher Carter, a fiction and nonfiction writer. I come from a long line of grudge-keepers. My father stopped talking to his brother when I was a toddler, cutting off half our family. Then, my mother stopped talking to her sister for decades, further depleting our holiday tables. Since I was a child, I have read books as a way to understand these complex human relationships; every novel serves as a blueprint of what to embrace or avoid. My writing also centers around this mystery of human relationships.
I teach at my local community college in Riverside, CA, just up the road from my house. When I'm not teaching composition, Shakespeare, Women's Literature, or American Literature, I'm usually home reading or out walking with my husband and two dogs.
I'm querying my novel RAZED (85,000 words). The opening was recently featured in Embark Literary Journal: Issue 17 October 2022
The story:
In 1970s upstate New York, a closeted woman with undiagnosed anxiety uses her librarian skills to challenge the public honoring of her wealthy, powerful family. Can she put an end to the lies without ruining her tenuous relationship with her sister?
In 1958, before the novel opens, Lucy Wilson witnessed her father physically attack a protestor who was marching against the town’s proposed elevated highway. The problem was that Lucy’s sister wasn’t there to see it, and afterward their visions of the world and their father diverged. Lucy, with the help of her soon-to-be girlfriend, Miranda, confronted her father, but by doing so she lost her inheritance and also her close relationship with her sister.
The novel opens in 1973, the year Nixon was investigated for Watergate and Roe v. Wade was passed by the Supreme Court. At her father’s funeral, 34-year-old Lucy is handed an accordion file with incriminating information about her father’s misdeeds, proving that he was bilking funds from the highway’s toll system and handing out favors with taxpayer money. Lucy does not accept this bulging folder. She says she has moved on. However, when her sister announces a plan to honor their father with a statue, Lucy can’t resist making one more attempt to pull the scales from her sister’s eyes—or, even better, from her niece Sarah’s eyes, since Sarah is now old enough to know the truth about her beloved grandfather.
RAZED addresses themes of privilege and power, as well as the heart-breaking rifts that families experience due to political and philosophical differences.
You can reach me at thatchercarter@yahoo.com
