"When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast swindling people. I sold fake trailer lot deeds to investors with souls more crooked than my own." This is the voice of Richard, the winning and irrepressible narrator of this novel in stories. Here, we follow Richard's chaotic childhood informed by his parents' passionate and rocky marriage, his mother's nervous breakdowns, his traveling salesman father's erratic attempts to earn his mother's love again, and their eventual divorce, through Richard's own trials with the women in his life.

Richard is like a traveler or pilgrim, moving from Haw River, North Carolina, to Arkansas to the Texas Gulf Coast and finally back to North Carolina again, as he and his people — they drink hard, dance in their kitchens, lie and cheat — struggle with their love and wrestle with their often inharmonious natures. In the end the narrator struggles to straighten out some small piece of his heart's crooked essence. My People's Waltz sadly celebrates the decisions we make to get on with the business of living.



The stories in this collection have appeared in the Atlantic, GQ, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best.


Here's what Dale Ray Phillips has said of his own work: "Writing a story is a strange act of discovery; generally, I find that what I have uncovered is nothing more than what I have always known. Also — and I'm embarrassed to admit this — I love to lie, and fiction offers an acceptable channel for this compulsion."