Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

program. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford where he taught creative writing for 28 years. Hannah won a Guggenheim the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.

Soon after this Hannah says he wrote his first truly good story "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt":

And then I wrote my first truly good story "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt" which was a piece of my then-forthcoming book Geronimo Rex. Howard Barry Hannah (April 23 1942 – March 1 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.