About this item
A hilarious send-up of writing workshops, for-profit education, and the gulf between believers and nonbelieversMarianne is in a slump: barely able to support herself by teaching, not making progress on her poetry, about to lose her Brooklyn apartment. When her novelist ex-fianc, Eric, and his venture capitalist brother, Mark, offer her a job directing a low-residency school for Christian writers at a motel they've inherited on Florida's Gulf Coast, she can't come up with a reason to say no. The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch is born, and liberal, atheist Marianne is soon knee-deep in applications from writers whose political and religious beliefs she has always opposed but whose money she's glad to take. Janine is a schoolteacher whose heartfelt poems explore the final days of Terri Schiavo's life. Davonte is a former R&B superstar who hopes to reboot his career with a bestselling tale of excess and redemption. Lorraine and Tom, eccentric writers in need of paying jobs, join the Ranch as instructors. Mark finds an investor in God's Word God's World, a business that develops for-profit schools for the Christian market, but the conditions that come along with their support become increasingly problematic, especially as Marianne grows closer to the students. As unsavory allegations mount, a hurricane bears down on the Ranch, and Marianne is faced with the consequences of her decisions.With sharp humor and deep empathy, The Gulf is a memorable debut novel in which Belle Boggs plumbs the troubled waters dividing America.
About the Author
Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia's Mattaponi River, and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, a nonfiction book that will be published in September 2016 by Graywolf Press. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Belle's stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Slate, Orion, Ecotone, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
