My mother grew up on the outskirts of a small Indiana town. When I was about ten years old, she loaded my brother, sister and me into the family Buick station wagon and then drove through the night so that we could visit our Indiana relatives. On this trip, Mom let me sit in the front with her while my younger brother and sister slept in the back. Mom woke me up as we crossed the state line dividing Illinois and Indiana, and I remember looking out the car window at dawn and seeing tidy farms flit by as made our way to Grandpa Pete’s house. I flashed on this memory as I was reading Karen Garloch’s new novel titled Stray Voltage.
Karen’s novel is set on an Indiana farm much like the farms that I gazed upon during the trip that I took with my mother as a boy. Like my mother, Karen grew up in rural Indiana where her family owned a farm. In the 1980s, Karen moved to Charlotte to pursue a career as a journalist with the Charlotte Observer, but her memories of living on an Indiana farm have stayed with her all these years. She draws on these memories in Stray Voltage, a powerful novel featuring an Indiana farm wife who risks everything to save the family farm.
I recently contacted Karen and asked her for more information about how she came to write Stray Voltage. Here is what she sent to me:
I started thinking about writing fiction in the late 1980s after I moved from the Midwest to take a reporting job at the Charlotte Observer. I began reading novels by celebrated Southern writers, wanting to familiarize myself with this new part of the country where I was making my home.
Books by Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, Barbara Kingsolver, Olive Ann Burns, and Wendell Berry, just to name a few, helped me see that a lot of Southern traditions are similar to those I knew in the rural Midwest. Families take casseroles to those who have lost loved ones. They attend church and potluck dinners (although in Indiana, we call them “pitch-in” dinners). Southern Hospitality didn’t seem much different from what we called Hoosier Hospitality.
It took moving away for me to realize how distinctive and undervalued Midwestern values are. I wondered why there isn’t a mystique about Midwestern literature as there is about Southern literature.
So, I started thinking about writing my own novel that would pay tribute to the farming community where I grew up in southern Indiana. It was too intimidating in those early years to think of myself as an “author,” but I made notes about people and stories from my childhood. About attending a one-room school for my first seven grades. About playing ferocious games of euchre with my family. About butchering hogs. About hanging out in the cattle barns at the county fair.
But that wasn’t enough for a novel. I needed a plot.
Then one day – I think it was 2015 – we got a visit from my childhood friend Dave and his wife. His family’s farm was adjacent to my family’s farm, and as an adult, Dave had become a bigtime dairy farmer. When asked how his farm was doing, Dave said it was good now that he got the “stray voltage problem” figured out.
I said, “Stray WHAT?”
He told an incredible story. Over 30 years, mysterious illnesses had befallen his cows, and no one could figure out why. Dave lost hundreds of cows and maybe millions of dollars. When he finally figured out the reason – stray voltage from the electrical system – he had trouble persuading the rural electric cooperative to take him seriously. He almost lost his farm.
I was sad for Dave. But I realized, this could be my plot! It would allow me to write about conflict and tension in a rural community.
From the internet, I learned that stray voltage was not an uncommon phenomenon in the upper Midwest. Big dairy farmers had filed lawsuits against electric companies and won jury verdicts in the millions of dollars. Despite that, stray voltage had gotten little attention in Indiana. I knew it would make a great subject.
To find out more about stray voltage, I interviewed one of the Minnesota farmers who won a multi-million-dollar verdict and a reporter who had covered the lawsuits in the upper Midwest. I also interviewed my friend Dave several times to make sure I understood as much about the phenomenon as I could. And finally, I interviewed the current CEO of the rural electric cooperative in southern Indiana, who had helped Dave resolve his problem.
Because I had spent so many years writing non-fiction, I knew I’d need help to create a novel. I wouldn’t have notes to refer to or people to interview for quotations. After I retired from the Observer, I applied for the Authors Lab, a mini-MFA program sponsored by Charlotte Center for Literary Arts. There, I met regularly with other students to hear lectures on fiction techniques and to critique each other’s work. I learned about writing dialogue, pacing scenes, and choosing the right point of view. It was during Authors Lab that I began thinking more about how to develop my female protagonist, the farm wife Hillie and through her to explore themes of marriage, gender expectations, resilience, and a woman’s growing desire to challenge authority.
I learned how to develop her “interiority”–to decide what she was thinking and feeling and help her figure out not just what she wanted (to save the cows), but also what she needed (a bigger voice in her family and community). Because she was dealing with an environmental hazard, I ended up comparing her to Erin Brockovich–but without short skirts, deep cleavage, and foul language!
I stayed in Authors Lab for four years, and when I finished my manuscript in 2024, I began querying agents who might help sell my book to a publisher. One of the Authors Lab teachers, Heather Newton, suggested that I enter my manuscript in two contests. To my surprise, I won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction sponsored by Regal House Publishing. And the prize included a contract for publication in fall 2026!
A Regal House judge told me she thought Stray Voltage should win because there aren’t enough books about “hardworking people with real struggles who must push back against a system everyone relies on, even if it means upending everything they hold dear.”
It may surprise some that I would set my novel in Indiana because I left the farm when I went to college and spent my career working for big city newspapers. But my parents’ farm and my childhood experiences never left my heart. I was moved by that line in the musical Hamilton: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” And I realized that if I didn’t write about this special place, no one would.
For readers who want to know more about Karen’s novel, please click on the following link: www.karengarloch.com
Karen will be doing a presentation and book signing at Park Road Books on October 28, 2026, at 7:00 pm. For more information about tis event, please click on the following link: https://parkroadbooks.com/event/2026-10-28/karen-garloch-discusses-her-new-book-stray-voltage-tommy-tomlinson
With the publication of Stray Voltage, Karen joins an impressive list of former Charlotte Observer writers and editors who have launched second careers as creative writers after leaving the Observer. This list includes Joseph Bathanti, Patricia Cornwell, Frye Gaillard, Pam Kelley, Dannye Romine Powell, Nancy Stancill, and Tommy Tomlinson. Storied Charlotte is a far richer place because of the literary contributions of Karen and her former Observer colleagues.
