Marian Szczepanski in Houston Press

A blog post, “100 Creatives 2014,” featuring alumna Marian Szczepanski (fiction, ’97) appears online in Houston Press. The blog’s author writes:

“It took Marian Szczepanski nine years to write her newly released novel Playing St. Barbara. She says she’ll probably spend another year publicizing and promoting it. “What’s another year, right?” she laughs. “I’ve already spent nine years of my life on this book. What can another year be?”

Her debut novel, Playing St. Barbara, the story of a Depression-era woman and her three daughters, was inspired by two elements of Szczepanski’s real life. The first, a family history tied to coal mines of Pennsylvania. The second, an interest in women’s history. Both of her grandfathers were immigrant coal miners and she had some information about them but she knew very little about her grandmothers’ lives. “I’ve always been interested in social history and women’s history and there’s nothing about the lives of women back in the coal era. I had no idea what women’s lives were like back then.””

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