Sheryl Monks's Blog
November 8, 2025
The Case for Moral Imagination: Why Stories Still Matter
In a world that rewards outrage and oversimplification, storytelling remains one of the last places where nuance survives -- where we can sit with ambiguity long enough to see that goodness, like truth, is rarely one-sided.
October 19, 2025
A Fresh Chapter: Writing, Reading, and What Comes Next
It’s been a while since I last posted here, and in that time, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways stories connect us. I’ve always believed that stories do more than entertain — they help us make sense of our lives, our histories, and our place in the world. For those of you who […]
November 25, 2019
Cause and effect: The case for cause marketing
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5 common myths about graphic design
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4 tips for effectively communicating with clients
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User Experience (UX) Design Trends for 2020
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June 29, 2018
AWP and The Faith of a Writer
Way back in 2008, I attended AWP in NYC, returning home as always with a head full of new ideas about publishing and writing. But one thing, above all else, lingers with me about that trip. Earlier in the week, I’d met two of my best writer pals, Karen and Susan, at the airport in … Continue reading AWP and The Faith of a Writer
September 27, 2016
Two New Reviews
Running behind on sharing good news.The Los Angeles ReviewandPublishers Weeklyboth recently weighed in onMonsters in Appalachia. Ryan Boyd at TLAR had this to say, in part:
"Monks’ attention to immediate consciousness is granular and gripping. In the first story, a badly traumatized woman who killed her abusive husband stares into a void of burning coal slag and pines for her children. She is drawn obsessively to the toxic landscape, a mirror of her own life: “It was the kerosene burns on the babies what found her negligent, sores where they’d crawled through raw fuel that one of the older ones had sloshed when filling the heater. Most people said she’d lost her sense from being beaten so often in the head, but they showed no pity on her. Now here she was, wandering the hillsides like a revenant.” The next narrative takes place in another coal hell—an unstable mine. “Already, they have cut a strip in both directions,” sweats the narrator, “and soon they’ll be coming back through the middle, robbing pillars it’s called,” his mind churning up the ironically poetic idiom.There are actual monsters in these pages, too. Monks saves them for last, the magic-realist title story. Melding the horrible and the comic, it depicts a countryside overrun by strange creatures, and involves, for instance, a hideous, bat-like fallen angel sharing a dinner with the elderly couple who own and employ him as a tout for their roadside freakshow, which is composed of other captive demons, some of whom they eat. Mountain tradition gets conscripted into the service of beast hunting: “Anse’s Plotts are of an olden breed, the keenest ever was. They can scent things never heard tell of. Trees? Why that must be simple, she guesses. She herself can scent trees, pine rosin and fruiting pawdads, thought not at a full tear through the dark.” The old mountain woman and her man, stock Appalachian characters, enter apocalyptic modernity, and the story closes with a Biblical vision of the world’s end.Appalachia is a place of frustrated longing. This informs the traditions of its fundamentalist Christianity, which craves a purified world. It fuels the outlaw moonshine culture that has given way to a plague of pills and heroin—a stillborn yearning for chemical escape. It shows up in cross-connected economic, geographical, and affective terms: the drive to get out, to find jobs that don’t involve coal or logging or Medicaid. I heeded that longing, heading to college after high school. Now I live in Los Angeles, where most of my neighbors know as much about Appalachia as I do about Oaxaca. Then again, after sixteen years I don’t know all that much about Appalachia either.Monsters in Appalachia made me want to go back, at least for a visit. To write about Appalachia is to write about America, as Poe realized, even if that is also where monsters are, and Sheryl Monks reports from this countryside as only a novelist can."Here's thePublishers Weeklystarred review:
"Monks knows her monsters, both literal and figurative. And she knows the territory of hills and hollers, where reality is sometimes heightened so sharply that it bleeds into myth. The 15 ferociously compressed stories in her collection sear their way into the reader’s brain with matter-of-fact horror. In just six pages, the opening story, “Burning Slag,” lets one grim, violent moment in the life of a troubled mother point to a future shimmering with brutal shocks. Monks (All the Girls in France) follows it up with the wrenching “Robbing Pillars,” a claustrophobic coal-mining tale with a touch of the supernatural. These stories sparkle with dark, extreme humor, such as “Nympho,” in which the relatively law-abiding son of Amway-dealing parents finds himself under the sway of a fellow middle schooler given to “throwing his lanky white arms into wild frog punches.” Others are naturalistic: a novel’s worth of family and community relationships are fitted into “Little Miss Bobcat.” And with the title story, the final one in the collection, Monks ventures deep into the realm of myth, for a satisfying vision of the intersection of the momentous and the everyday. (Nov.)"
"Monks’ attention to immediate consciousness is granular and gripping. In the first story, a badly traumatized woman who killed her abusive husband stares into a void of burning coal slag and pines for her children. She is drawn obsessively to the toxic landscape, a mirror of her own life: “It was the kerosene burns on the babies what found her negligent, sores where they’d crawled through raw fuel that one of the older ones had sloshed when filling the heater. Most people said she’d lost her sense from being beaten so often in the head, but they showed no pity on her. Now here she was, wandering the hillsides like a revenant.” The next narrative takes place in another coal hell—an unstable mine. “Already, they have cut a strip in both directions,” sweats the narrator, “and soon they’ll be coming back through the middle, robbing pillars it’s called,” his mind churning up the ironically poetic idiom.There are actual monsters in these pages, too. Monks saves them for last, the magic-realist title story. Melding the horrible and the comic, it depicts a countryside overrun by strange creatures, and involves, for instance, a hideous, bat-like fallen angel sharing a dinner with the elderly couple who own and employ him as a tout for their roadside freakshow, which is composed of other captive demons, some of whom they eat. Mountain tradition gets conscripted into the service of beast hunting: “Anse’s Plotts are of an olden breed, the keenest ever was. They can scent things never heard tell of. Trees? Why that must be simple, she guesses. She herself can scent trees, pine rosin and fruiting pawdads, thought not at a full tear through the dark.” The old mountain woman and her man, stock Appalachian characters, enter apocalyptic modernity, and the story closes with a Biblical vision of the world’s end.Appalachia is a place of frustrated longing. This informs the traditions of its fundamentalist Christianity, which craves a purified world. It fuels the outlaw moonshine culture that has given way to a plague of pills and heroin—a stillborn yearning for chemical escape. It shows up in cross-connected economic, geographical, and affective terms: the drive to get out, to find jobs that don’t involve coal or logging or Medicaid. I heeded that longing, heading to college after high school. Now I live in Los Angeles, where most of my neighbors know as much about Appalachia as I do about Oaxaca. Then again, after sixteen years I don’t know all that much about Appalachia either.Monsters in Appalachia made me want to go back, at least for a visit. To write about Appalachia is to write about America, as Poe realized, even if that is also where monsters are, and Sheryl Monks reports from this countryside as only a novelist can."Here's thePublishers Weeklystarred review:"Monks knows her monsters, both literal and figurative. And she knows the territory of hills and hollers, where reality is sometimes heightened so sharply that it bleeds into myth. The 15 ferociously compressed stories in her collection sear their way into the reader’s brain with matter-of-fact horror. In just six pages, the opening story, “Burning Slag,” lets one grim, violent moment in the life of a troubled mother point to a future shimmering with brutal shocks. Monks (All the Girls in France) follows it up with the wrenching “Robbing Pillars,” a claustrophobic coal-mining tale with a touch of the supernatural. These stories sparkle with dark, extreme humor, such as “Nympho,” in which the relatively law-abiding son of Amway-dealing parents finds himself under the sway of a fellow middle schooler given to “throwing his lanky white arms into wild frog punches.” Others are naturalistic: a novel’s worth of family and community relationships are fitted into “Little Miss Bobcat.” And with the title story, the final one in the collection, Monks ventures deep into the realm of myth, for a satisfying vision of the intersection of the momentous and the everyday. (Nov.)"
September 2, 2016
Praise for Monsters in Appalachia
“These elemental stories take on the dark Appalachian territory of David Joy and Ron Rash with a kind of raw, absolute, female confidence. Coal miners, snake handlers, smart, scary women at their wits end-- all at the mercy of their terrific landscape. Monsters In Appalachia offers a glimpse of the edge of a world that seems freshly electric, and treacherous as hell.”
~ Ashley Warlick, author of The Arrangement, and The Distance from the Heart of Things
“There’s music in these stories—visceral, rhythmical, soulful, deep. They are siren songs, taking us places we otherwise might not go.”
~ Kim Church, author of Byrd
“Sheryl Monks's stories are gorgeously written dispatches from Appalachia, telling the difficult truth of what it is to survive in a place that can exact a heavy price. But these tales are generous too, and a particular grace sets on them all.”
~ Charles Dodd White, author of A Shelter of Others, and Sinners of Sanction County
“Monsters in Appalachia is wildly outrageous at times but there is empathy in these stories as well. Humor and sadness achieve a delicate balance.”
~ Ron Rash, author of Serena, and Something Rich and Strange
“Sheryl Monks writes with unflinching honesty and deep affection about the Appalachia I know: a place of imminent peril to both body and soul, home to lingering ghosts. Her gorgeous (but never merely decorative) language generously limns the hard mountain landscape as well as the luminously-realized and all-too-human folks who struggle there. This collection brought me home again.”
~ Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories, The Wrecking Yard, and Dogs of God
“Monsters in Appalachia introduces a fresh, new voice in contemporary fiction, in stories of teenage angst, bonds of family, motherhood, and contradictions of middle age. Always surprising, with touches of humor and magic, and seductive, snake-handling preachers, these stories conjure both sorrow and mystery with intimate loving detail.”
~ Robert Morgan, author of Chasing the North Star, Gap Creek, and The Balm of Gilead Tree
“Haunting, raw, terrifying, and passionate.”
~ Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots, Help Wanted: Female, and Lately
“Sheryl Monks gives us such a range and depth of character in one collection. Her stories continue to delight and haunt long after reading.”
~ Renée K. Nicholson, author of Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center
~ Ashley Warlick, author of The Arrangement, and The Distance from the Heart of Things
“There’s music in these stories—visceral, rhythmical, soulful, deep. They are siren songs, taking us places we otherwise might not go.”
~ Kim Church, author of Byrd
“Sheryl Monks's stories are gorgeously written dispatches from Appalachia, telling the difficult truth of what it is to survive in a place that can exact a heavy price. But these tales are generous too, and a particular grace sets on them all.”
~ Charles Dodd White, author of A Shelter of Others, and Sinners of Sanction County
“Monsters in Appalachia is wildly outrageous at times but there is empathy in these stories as well. Humor and sadness achieve a delicate balance.”
~ Ron Rash, author of Serena, and Something Rich and Strange
“Sheryl Monks writes with unflinching honesty and deep affection about the Appalachia I know: a place of imminent peril to both body and soul, home to lingering ghosts. Her gorgeous (but never merely decorative) language generously limns the hard mountain landscape as well as the luminously-realized and all-too-human folks who struggle there. This collection brought me home again.”
~ Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories, The Wrecking Yard, and Dogs of God
“Monsters in Appalachia introduces a fresh, new voice in contemporary fiction, in stories of teenage angst, bonds of family, motherhood, and contradictions of middle age. Always surprising, with touches of humor and magic, and seductive, snake-handling preachers, these stories conjure both sorrow and mystery with intimate loving detail.”
~ Robert Morgan, author of Chasing the North Star, Gap Creek, and The Balm of Gilead Tree
“Haunting, raw, terrifying, and passionate.”
~ Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots, Help Wanted: Female, and Lately
“Sheryl Monks gives us such a range and depth of character in one collection. Her stories continue to delight and haunt long after reading.”
~ Renée K. Nicholson, author of Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center
August 25, 2016
Upcoming Events
Monsters in Appalachia, my debut collection of stories, hits bookstores Nov. 1, 2016. Here are a few places you can come out and say hi to me this fall. More to come! Keep an eye on mywebsite events page.
