My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

program. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford where he taught creative writing for 28 years. Hannah won a Guggenheim the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.

Soon after this Hannah says he wrote his first truly good story "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt":

And then I wrote my first truly good story "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt" which was a piece of my then-forthcoming book Geronimo Rex. Howard Barry Hannah (April 23 1942 – March 1 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.