LASKAS, Gretchen Moran

PERSONAL: Born in WV; married Karl Laskas (a lawyer); children: Brennan. Education: University of Pittsburgh, B.A., 1992.

ADDRESSES: Home—Gainesville, VA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Dial Press, Dell Publishing, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036. E-mail—gretchenm [email protected].

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Tom Jackson Memorial Prize in fiction, Appalachian Writers Association, 1994; Weatherford Award, 2003, for The Midwife's Tale.

WRITINGS:

The Midwife's Tale, Dial (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Pleiades and Salt Hill.

SIDELIGHTS: In her debut novel, The Midwife's Tale, Gretchen Moran Laskas offers "a tender story of broken dreams," in the words of Booklist critic Elsa Gaztambide. Set in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia in the early 1900s, The Midwife's Tale concerns Elizabeth Whitely, who is destined to become a midwife like her mother and grandmother before her. Elizabeth is secretly in love with Alvin Denniker, a married man whose wife, Ivy, calls upon Elizabeth to help her through a difficult delivery. To show their gratitude, Alvin and Ivy name the baby Lauren Elizabeth, and Elizabeth befriends the couple.

After Ivy dies, Elizabeth moves in with Alvin and becomes a mother to Lauren. Alvin and Elizabeth try to start their own family, but they discover that Elizabeth cannot bear children of her own. The family's simple life is disrupted when Lauren displays an amazing gift for healing, and while Alvin takes his daughter to California to escape the resulting local notoriety, Elizabeth stays behind, tending to the needs of others. As Pam Kingsbury noted on the Southern Scribe Web site, while Elizabeth "may not be able to follow her own heart, she learns how to comfort other women's hearts."

Critics praised the novel's atmosphere as well as the author's attention to small details. "The Midwife's Tale unspools gently across the page, as comforting in its nostalgia as the sound of an old foot-pump organ in a country church," wrote David Abrams in January Magazine. Eileen Zimmerman Nicol, reviewing the work for Bookeporter.com, stated that "Laskas salts her narrative with the vernacular of the time and place." According to Library Journal contributor Lisa Nussbaum, The Midwife's Tale is ultimately about "the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, friends and lovers and about the inheritance of and passing on of family traditions."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 2003, Elsa Gaztambide, review of The Midwife's Tale, pp. 1145-1146.

January Magazine, September, 2003, David Abrams, "Birthin' Babies in Old Appalachia."

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2003, review of TheMidwife's Tale, p. 165.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Lisa Nussbaum, review of The Midwife's Tale, p. 115.

ONLINE

Bookreporter.comhttp://www.bookreporter.com/ (April 17, 2004), Eileen Zimmerman Nicol, review of The Midwife's Tale.

ReadingGroupGuides.com,http://www.readinggroupguides.com/ (April 17, 2004), review of The Midwife's Tale.

Romantic Times,http://www.romantictimes.com/ (April 17, 2004), Sheri Melnick, review of The Midwife's Tale.

Southern Scribe,http://www.southernscribe.com/ (March 29, 2003), Pam Kingsbury, review of The Midwife's Tale.*