Goodreads asked Marylee MacDonald:

How do you get inspired to write?

Marylee MacDonald When I was a freshman at Vassar, my English teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Blackburn, gave us some assignments where we could tell stories instead of writing typical college papers analyzing some dead writer. She praised the stories I turned in and put them in a box in the library where other students could take a look at them.

In a funny coincidence I spoke with one of my freshman-year dorm mates yesterday, and she recalled one of those stories I submitted. It involved a black swimming pool and a father who made his daughter swim in it. It wasn't a full story, just a scene. Back then I had no idea what constituted a full story. I actually thought I had written one, but I had not.

For me and many other writers, stories begin with a single image. The image of the girl in the swimming pool--very autobiographical, unfortunately--became the core of a story I wrote fifty years later: "The Pancho Villa Coin."

William Gay picked the story for the Yalobusha Review's Barry Hannah Prize. The odd thing is, I didn't remember writing that story when I was a freshman, but it must have been submerged in the unknowable, murky depths of wherever stories come from. It floated to the top.

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