When Karen Garloch left the Cincinnati Enquirer after 10 years in 1987 and moved to North Carolina, she started thinking about writing fiction instead of news stories.
Nearly 40 years later, those notes she jotted down about growing up on a southern Indiana farm, and people and stories from her childhood, have been woven into her first novel, Stray Voltage. She will talk about and sign her book at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Rookwood Commons at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5.
“I thought about writing fiction mostly during summer vacations, when I had time to read and think,” says Garloch, who started her newspaper career in Middletown after graduating from Ball State University in 1973. She joined the Enquirer in 1977, after writing stories about Edgewood High School teachers who perished in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.
The Charlotte Observer hired her as health reporter in 1987. She worked there for 30 years, and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
But she never gave up on her dream of writing a novel. In the late 1990s, she would write fiction once a week at a coffee shop with a friend before going into the newsroom.
“I just worked hard at making up dialog and that kind of thing, outside of work. But doing it once a week is not enough” to write a book, she said.
After retiring in 2017, she got serious about writing fiction and entered the Charlotte Center for Literacy’s Authors Lab program.
“The Authors Lab taught me how to create compelling characters, plot tension-filled scenes and write realistic dialog,” she says. During COVID-19 she wrote the book about an Indiana farm family while sitting on her backyard deck with her MacBook on her lap.
Garloch had always been fascinated by popular Southern novels — Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, and Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.
“All are set on farms and involve strong women and interesting characters facing down-home dilemmas,” she says. “I realized that a lot of the traditions they described were similar to those I knew in the Midwest. Southerners touted their hospitality, but was it really any different from Hoosier hospitality?”
In Stray Voltage, Midwestern dairy farmers can’t figure out what is killing their cows and threatening their livelihood.
“When farm wife Hillie Schumacher realizes stray voltage from electric lines could be the cause, no one believes her. To save the farm, she must defy her husband, Fred, and confront other powerful men in her church and community, putting both her marriage and their farm’s reputation at risk,” according to her website, karengarloch.com.
She compares Hillie to environmental activist Erin Brockovich, “but without short skirts, deep cleavage and foul language.”
Garloch grew up on a 140-acre farm near Brownstown, Ind., about 45 miles southeast of Bloomington. All four kids — two boys and two girls — learned to drive tractors while in grade school. They milked cows, plowed fields, baled hay, and picked corn and tomatoes for sale at the roadside.
She met her future husband Larry Garloch at Brownstown Central High School. He attended Miami University on a basketball scholarship and captained the team in 1972-73; she studied journalism at Ball State University. After she graduated in March 1973, they married and she was hired by the Middletown Journal to cover city government. Four years later she headed for Cincinnati.
When she walked through the polished brass doors of the Enquirer building at 617 Vine Street for her first day of work, she says she felt like hat-flinging Mary Richards on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
While Karen reported the news, her husband coached basketball and taught throughout Greater Cincinnati at Talawanda, Turpin, Wyoming and Reading high schools. In North Carolina, he coached high school basketball for one year and eight years at Davidson College. He also ran a private basketball tutoring business, coaching kids one-on-one and in camps, called Hoops Help, until he retired, she says.
Garloch completed Stray Voltage in 2024 and entered the manuscript in two literary contests — and won the 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction sponsored by Regal House Publishing. The prize included a contract for publication in fall 2026.
Not many novels are set in Indiana. Garloch contends that the contemporary Midwest is often ignored in today’s fiction.
“It may be surprising that I chose this setting because I haven’t lived on the farm since I went to college and reached my goal of working for a big city newspaper," she says. "But my parents’ farm and my childhood experiences never left my heart.”
Garloch also will sign copies of Stray Voltage at Oxford’s Lane Public Library, 441 S. Locust St., Oxford, at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 6.
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