Sing Soft, Sing Loud

by Patricia McConnel

Sing Soft, Sing Loud is an autobiographical novel based on the author's experiences in jails and prison. This book, first published by Atheneum in hard cover in 1989, has become a classic of prison literature. It explores the lives of women felons--who they are, and how they survive the soul-killing realities of jails and prison. Patricia McConnel's writing is unflinching. She uses fiction to illuminate the stark realities of women who live The Life . Sing Soft, Sing Loud allows us to know these women through their own eyes and with meticulously rendered voices, the screws who run their lives, their fellow inmates, and their men, with an intimacy that no sociological or journalistic account can ever reveal.

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1989

About the author

From vagrant, drug mule, and dilettante hooker to award-winning author in a mere forty years

By my sixteenth birthday I had already ridden freights and hitchhiked across the country, and had accomplished the first of several incarcerations. Before I was out of my teens I had been fired from two waitress jobs for general inefficiency, one job as a B-girl for the same reason, and two jobs for refusing to sleep with the boss. Desperate, I joined the WAC (Women's Army Corps), but was discharged in less than a year for general inadaptability. I have had a distinguished career, if I do say so myself.

After a series of short-lived jobs in machine shops and cocktail bars (I had learned to quit before I was fired), I turned to a life of crime, which seemed to offer high wages for people like myself, that is, with no particular skills. After failing at that as well, eventually ending up in prison, I tried marriage, the worst disaster of all. When you've failed at everything you ever tried, what's left? To become a writer, of course. 

As a writer, I continued the pattern of failure for many, many years, but eventually found an agent who saw some value in my work. In 1986 my first book was published: The Woman's Work-At-Home Handbook: Income and Independence With A Computer (Bantam Books). While working on that book I won my first creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983) for work that eventually became Sing Soft, Sing Loud, an autobiographical novel about women on the street and in prison, published originally in hardcover by Atheneum and now available in paperback from Logoría Books (read more about the book at www.singsoftsingloud.com).

A second NEA fellowship came in 1988. My short story "The Aviarian" was chosen as one of the Ten Best PEN Short Stories of 1984. In 1985 I was invited to give a reading at the Library of Congress. My short stories appear in eight anthologies.

Although I never finished high school, I taught creative writing for a year at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, but I failed to adapt successfully to the academic environment. For a few years I visited jails and prisons to give readings and teach writing workshops. Having accepted once and for all that I am unemployable, I make my living at home as an independent contractor doing technical writing and editing. I'm at work on a novel, The Quest of Elizabeth Halfpenny (pronounced hay-penny), which is an attempt to write a heroic quest myth that has relevance to the lives of 21st century women, and a memoir about being a ne'er-do-well.

I live in Dead Cat, Arizona, in a pocket of the Coconino National Forest at 7000 feet. I share my little plot of ground with companions of various species (racoons, stray cats, pocket gophers, wild birds, porcupines, Abert's squirrels, and an occasional coyote) and a 26-year-old truck, Serafina, given to at least one major breakdown a year. I attempt to repair her myself but of course I usually fail.