Why Guineas Fly

About the Author MARK E. SANDERS is a Plains native—born, raised, and educated in Nebraska. His poems, stories, and creative essays have appeared in publications in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, including Glimmer Train, Puerto Del Sol, Dalhousie Review, Prairie Schooner, Western American Literature, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and numerous others. Also in 2007, he received the Mildred Bennett Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book for fostering Nebraska’s literary heritage. He has taught in colleges and universities in Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Texas. He resides with his wife on a small ranch in east Texas. Product Description A native of the Great Plains, Sanders captures well what it is to live and survive the harsh territory of America’s flatlands.  Unlike his literary forebears, however, writers such as Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Wright Morris, Sanders does not romanticize—as Cather or Sandoz often did—the Plains experience; nor does he disengage his characters, in the manner of Morris, from the emotional weather straining to engulf them or to blow them off the earth’s face.  The grotesque place of Sanders’s world places his people deep in the drought, the deluge, the erosion, and—even if they should fail—they go out scraping and scrapping.  This is fiction that sees stubbornness as a virtue, ugly and mean as such virtue may be.