Meet the Author: Brandi Megan Granett

When I was a kid, everyone called me weird. At first this stung, and then later, I accepted it, wore my weirdness as a badge of honor. I wore crazy clothes, had pink hair, and liked punk rock music in the age of grunge. I wrote stories on paper and in my head. I took spelling tests as creative writing assignments; I worried my favorite English teacher.

And then in college I discovered creative writing and the world of the short story. I read, Because it is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart by Joyce Carol Oates and Self Help by Lorrie Moore and Crash Diet by Jill McCorkle and suddenly, I found that I wasn’t so weird. Or that maybe if I was, writing presented an opportunity to invite people into my world, so they could see things through my eyes. If you are in charge of the fictional place, it can’t be judged or ridiculed, it exists as you created it.

So I set out to tell more stories, to write about people that face life in new ways, ways people could call weird, but in my fiction, it’s just called life. Then I learned how to teach other people how to tell stories so they too could create their own worlds and share their own points of view. If more people told their stories,  both real and imagined, the world would be a lot closer to tolerance and understanding. I believe that story telling, the long tradition that enable humans to learn and retain knowledge through generations, is still needed to bridge gaps between people and heal the fracture of our time.

So, I still like crazy clothes, have blue hair, and listen to both punk music and grunge, and I still write stories, hoping to share my little slice of the world with you. So thank you for reading, and it was nice to meet you. If you want to tell me why you write, I would love to hear about it on Twitter or Facebook or the comments below.

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The characters of Cars and Other Things that Get Around span all ages and genders, yet each faces the same question: where do I go from here? There’s Marilyn and her boyfriend waiting for the ovarian cancer screen results, Vita waiting for Joe to notice their long time friendship was really the first step toward something more, Samuel, an Amish man, waiting for his wayward son to come home, Helen facing the dawning realization that dementia is bearing down on her, and Delilah waiting for Markus to love her instead of the money she makes for them turning tricks.


Cars and Other Things That Get Around is the first collection of fifteen stories by Huffington Post blogger and author of My Intended (Eagle Brook/Morrow, 2000) Brandi Megan Granett.

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