Contemporary Authors

• The Annie Year ( novel) Unnamed Press (Los Angeles, CA), 2016

• Stephanie Wilbur Ash Home Page - https://stephaniewilburash.com

  I’m Steph, author of the novel The Annie Year, published in October 2016 from Unnamed Press.

  “Introducing Tandy Caide, a big-boned, hard-nosed pragmatist and the only CPA in her small prairie town. Except for the home explosions caused by her town’s unfortunate methamphetamine problem, her life is a steady churn of Chamber of Commerce meetings, bean soup, crop rotations, barely tolerable high school musicals, and passive aggressive conflict avoidance. Until the new vocational agriculture teacher elfows up—with his ponytail and his man clogs and his multicolored beaded belt. He’s all wrong for this town, and especially wrong for Tandy, who happens to be married. But, as Tandy notes, “Everyone gets to f*ck a fool at least once in their life.”…

  I am a former editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. And I was one of the literary/musical comedians behind the Lit 6 Project (loud, drunken, funny, connected stories told in bars across the Midwest), the Electric Arc Radio Show (episodic musical comedy heard on Minnesota Public Radio), and Don’t Crush Our Heart! (the world’s only full-length twee-pop musical/courtroom drama).

  I am now editorial director of a small liberal arts college (Gustavus Adolphus College) in a small prairie town in Minnesota similar to the one in which I was raised. Occasionally I parent four children, all teenagers. I am married to novelist/professor Geoff Herbach, and I split my time between Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota, which is where, on TV’s Little House on the Prairie, Mary learns she is going blind and Albert becomes addicted to morphine. In Mankato I live in a log cabin originally homesteaded by German immigrants but rebuilt with two bathrooms and radiant floor heating, just like the pioneers always dreamed.

  EMAIL steph | stephaniewilburash | com

• Minnesota Public Radio News Web site - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/10/20/books-the-annie-year

  Novel offers a fierce hymn to troubled small towns
  The Thread
  Euan Kerr · Oct 20, 2016

  Listen Stephanie Wilbur Ash reads from 'The Annie Year'
  4min
  Listen Story audio
  3min 59sec

  'The Annie Year' is the debut novel from Stephanie Wilbur Ash.
  'The Annie Year' is the debut novel from Stephanie Wilbur Ash. Courtesy Unnamed Press

  Minnesota writer Stephanie Wilbur Ash's new novel "The Annie Year" is a fierce hymn to small Midwestern towns, and the women who live there.

  The story is about a 30-something CPA. She knows everyone's financial secrets, and many of the non-financial secrets too. But her life is turned upside down by the arrival of a new teacher at the high school.

  As houses around town begin exploding, it's clear something is wrong.

  Ash traces "The Annie Year" back to her own formative experiences.

  "This book absolutely comes from having to stand up at the 400 Bar on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota and tell a story before a noted local band goes on," she said.

  The venue imposed very specific strictures. And a time limit. Ash said a writer had just seven seconds to win over a bar crowd.

  "Your story has to be loud and unusual and probably has to be really funny and really raunchy," she said.
  Stephanie Wilbur Ash, author of The Annie Year.
  Stephanie Wilbur Ash, author of The Annie Year. Euan Kerr | MPR News

  Ash was part of Lit 6, a group specializing in literary bar gigs. She says she needed to find a special, unusual voice. So her character Tandy Caide emerged from the blast furnace of bar literature.

  "A little angry, a little raunchy, a little, I would say, grumpy. Some people have described her as grumpy."

  Tandy is an accountant in a small Iowa town. She knows everyone, and everyone knows her. She's taken over her late father's business, and to a certain extent her father's friends too. She's chafing at the sameness of it all.

  "Small rural areas, and I am from one, they can be very homogeneous," Ash said. "And this exotic creature comes to town in the shape of a vocational agriculture teacher with a ponytail, and an unusual belt, and some Peace Corps experience. And you know, she's into that. She's into that. Who isn't, though, really?"

  In the book, Tandy is introduced to the new guy by the high school principal.

  The Vo-Ag teacher said "Well, Principal Bierbauer here was asking me about my belt, Tandy."

  He said my name slowly, in what you might call a deliberate way. It sounded like he thought my name was special, like it was full of potential. No one had ever said my name like that before.

  Tandy is having a bad year, but embarks on an affair. She does so knowing there are no secrets in her small town. Complicating matters, she is married, and already involved in another dalliance. She'd love to talk to someone about it. But she hasn't spoken to her best friend in years, even though she sees her every day in passing. And that's not all:

  She also hates musical theater, and so of course it had to be the year that the high school does the musical "Annie."

  Hence the title of the novel.

  "The Annie Year" is both funny and dark. It's set against the economic struggles of the area, and the realities of a methamphetamine problem. Ash says her hometown of Oelwein, Iowa, was the subject of the bestselling book "Methland." The combination of hard times and drug problems produces a particular small-town perspective.

  "There's a sort of fatalistic absurdism about that," she said. "In the town in which my novel takes place, they don't even have enough money to buy the clean-up uniform that you have to clean it up. They have to share it. So one person wears the bottom and one person wears the top."

  Ash is reading from the book at a sold-out event Thursday in Excelsior, and then Saturday evening at Subtext Books in St Paul.

  While Ash pokes fun at this small town, she's very protective of small-town life. She talks about being spurred by a line from a Paul Gruchow essay about the underlying message he believed society teaches rural children.

  "And the answer is, 'If you were any good, you wouldn't be here,'" said Ash. "And that really kicked off the energy of this novel, and so the fierceness I hope that you recognize is, I am not going to accept that. I am not going to accept that about myself."

  And neither is Tandy Caide in "The Annie Year."

• City Pages - http://www.citypages.com/arts/stephanie-wilbur-ash-on-small-towns-meth-labs-and-the-annie-year/411351535

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash on small towns, meth labs, and 'The Annie Year'
  Tuesday, January 31, 2017 by Erica Rivera in Arts & Leisure
  itemprop

  Small-town CPA Tandy Caide is in a rut. Her husband would rather eat sandwiches in the hot tub than be with her. Her Chamber of Commerce meetings are filled with predictable pessimism. Even the frequent explosions of local meth labs have become ho-hum.

  Then a new vocational agriculture teacher appears, a ponytailed man who wears clogs and doesn’t fit in among the bowling enthusiasts.

  As Tandy is told, “Everyone gets to fuck a fool at least once in their life.” Now, it’s her turn…and it’s only a matter of time until the meth labs aren’t the only thing blowing up.

  Ash is the former senior editor of Mpls-St. Paul magazine and the current director of editorial services at Gustavus-Adolphus College in St. Peter. She divides her time between Minneapolis and Mankato.

  City Pages: In the book, Tandy says, “Do you know what they do in this town to anyone who thinks she is something special? They eat her for lunch.” Has that been your experience of Midwestern culture? That we’re supposed to be meek and keep a low profile?

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash: I think that’s indicative of insular communities. And also, it’s indicative of a Scandinavian, Germanic, agrarian way of being. I don’t think it’s an entirely bad thing. Throughout the novel, she comes to some more open-hearted conclusions about the benefits of living that way, but I do think that’s the Midwestern way.

  CP: Why did you want Tandy’s rebellion to take the form of sexually acting out?

  SWA: ‘Cause that’s pretty fun! It’s a morally ambiguous space, so it makes her unreliable. She’s not a bad person. She has an extra-marital affair with a guy most people in town despise, but you still cheer for her and love her. I think that’s kind of cool. It makes for an interesting woman protagonist, something that we don’t see a lot, something I don’t think we see enough of.

  CP: Talk about the inclusion of the meth-making community in the book. What kind of research did you do, if any, to get a feel for that?

  SWA: I’m from Oelwein, Iowa, and Oelwein was the subject of a New York Times bestseller called Methland. It was a non-fiction book that used Oelwein as an example of the way that rural economies have collapsed and made way for the methamphetamine epidemic. I had some cultural experiences because that’s my home place. I then did some extensive research on how that came about and how it impacted rural communities. The houses that explode in the town in my novel -- that really happens. Homemade meth labs go bad and they explode. I wrote this novel before Breaking Bad. I was working on this novel before Methland came out. I feel like our culture knows more about it now than they did when I was writing this novel.

  CP: Having lived in a city like Minneapolis and in small towns, do you feel like you can be yourself in both places? You seem like someone who has a big personality.

  SWA: [Laughs.] That is so funny because at Gustavus, I can’t even tell you how often people have said those words, “You seem to have a big personality.” I love it so much. Can I be myself in both places? Yes, I think so. I have dual citizenship. I have insider-outsider status, which means I can toggle between those two experiences. I have a really deep understanding and deep knowledge and love for rural, small towns and small business people and farmers and agrarian culture. And I have a swooning and unabiding love for Minneapolis. I can stand in both places.

  CP: You use the second person at times in the book. Is that because you wanted to speak directly to the reader?

  SWA: It started, I think, because I wasn’t that great of a writer. I didn’t know how to tell the reader how my character felt about her position. I wanted to show that my character was aware of what other people think about her in the culture, but I wrote a first-person novel, so I couldn’t do a lot of psychological exposition from a distance. While I was writing, I just fell into telling it, like, “You people, other people not living in rural small towns, I don’t think you get it. You don’t understand me.” And it became very effective because my character has a complicated relationship with her own place.

  CP: You’ve been a writer for a long time. What made this the right story and the right time for your debut novel?

  SWA: I wrote a short story about this character and it had the “C UNT ITCHEN” joke [kids throw rocks at the illuminated COUNTRY KITCHEN sign until certain bulbs break] in it. I had to read the story in a bar, and that’s why it had a really loud, raunchy joke. The character was really interesting. I knew that person in my mind but I had not seen that character in any literature before. I had not read a novel about a woman CPA. Ever.

  Then I set up this blog, like 2005 maybe, where Tandy had an advice column, and people would write in with their tax questions and also their personal questions. So, like, “I still pine for my ex-girlfriend. Can I claim her as a dependent on my tax return?” or “Tandy, do you believe in God? And if so, is He a 501(c)(3)?” I just had so much fun answering these things and in doing so, I really started to develop the voice. The voice came first and then I thought, “Wow. This really could be a novel.” I developed some initial characters. It turned out fabulously. I’m so happy and grateful for it.

  IF YOU GO:

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash, The Annie Year
  Hamline Midway Library
  7 p.m. Wednesday, February 1
  Free
  All ages

• Fear No Lit DID NOT INCLUDE;SAME AS ABOVE - http://www.fearnolit.com/fail-better-stephanie-wilbur-ash/

  Fail Better: Thinking critically with novelist Stephanie Wilbur Ash

  March 22, 2017 James Figy Fail Better

  The Annie Year, Stephanie Wilbur Ash’s debut novel, begins with this epigraph from Winesburg, Ohio: “Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it ‘Tandy.’” And Tandy Caide CPA, the protagonist of Ash’s novel, lives up to the namesake. Tall and sturdily built, she crashes through her northern Iowa hometown like a tornado after meeting Kenny, the new vocational agriculture teacher with a ponytail and beaded belt. Tandy’s defeats are many—her inability to fix her marriage, to live up to her father’s standards, to make amends with her best friend, even to maintain a steamy affair with the Vo-Ag teacher. But by facing them, she is born anew by the book’s end.

  It’s interesting to note that Sherwood Anderson was unable to accept failure. He claimed most Winesburg stories materialized in a flash of inspiration, not one word altered. Even though he revised stories between publication in literary magazines and the final book, Anderson peddled “the fantasy of the uninitiated,” as Anne Lamott calls it. That is, the idea that writers “take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter.” To Anderson failure revealed incompetence, not possibility.

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash holds no such illusions. When I interviewed her for the local newspaper, she explained how The Annie Year started as a dirty joke for storytelling events in bars, was rejected as a short story, and after a decade of trial and error, evolved into the finished novel—a 2017 Minnesota Book Award finalist, no less. Stephanie labored over the novel while completing her MFA from Hamline University in the Twin Cities. She has worked as a freelance writer and editor of Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, and is currently Gustavus Adolphus College’s editorial director. When we spoke, she’d barely returned from interviewing Gustavus alumni in Washington, D.C. But we’ll get to that.
  What’s the worst thing you’ve ever written?
  Minnesota author Stephanie Wilbur Ash

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash, author of The Annie Year.

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash: So, I wrote an essay about how awful it was to be home with my children. I was going through a really depressive time. I was a frustrated stay-at-home mom, I was in a bad marriage, and I felt very alone. I am so regretful about that piece of writing, not necessarily because it was bad—though it was bad. I was trying to make raw emotions you might put in your journal into a wonderful personal essay. The bits and pieces I remember are so self-involved.

  What I’ve taken from that, as I have evolved as a writer, is that no one really wants to read about you. They want to read about the world or about themselves. They want to read a story that either confirms their worldview or challenges it, although a lot of people don’t want to read anything that challenges their worldview anymore. (Those are the real assholes in the world.) That’s what literature does: It puts you in a morally ambiguous space where you’re going to be challenged.

  So somewhere at the back of a file cabinet in a manilla envelope is this piece of writing, and I am afraid to look at it. Talking about it makes me uncomfortable. Even six months after I wrote it, I was embarrassed. My then-husband, now my ex-husband, brought it to a therapy session and read it out loud to a therapist. I can’t even tell you how awful that was. But it was an awfulness I made. It was born out of solipsism.
  You said it was like something you would put in your journal, but when you write an essay you need time for reflection. Do you think that was one of the main problems with it?

  SWA: There was no reflection. There was no perspective outside of myself. There was no empathy for anyone but me. There was no awareness of my personal position in the world. There was no checking of my own privilege. There was nothing that the reader could look at and say, “You know, this writer knows something beyond herself.” There was no context. Nothing. There was only emotion and criticism and doom—and a few jokes.
  So how do we as writers recognize if a piece has the ability to transcend that self-centeredness?

  SWA: It’s very dangerous to write from a space of anger. It’s okay to write from injustice. But you can only feel injustice if you have a picture of how the world works that’s larger than your emotions. Anger is blind. So I would say one thing you can do is stay out of blind anger. I’m not saying you can’t have anger. But it’s not a great writing space.

  A really good technique is to write from the perspective of the other people. I should have worked on writing empathy for the people around me, and in doing so, I might have found some kindness or a larger sense of what was happening.

  Also, making a list of the privileges you as a character have. I had the ability to be a stay at home mom, I had two healthy children, I had a husband who made a very good living, I had two degrees. It doesn’t mean you can’t have these feelings. It’s just basic critical thinking. You really have to check yourself. Check yourself before you wreck yourself, as the saying goes.
  The Annie Year novelWas it easier to analyze those things about Tandy Caide and the other characters in The Annie Year?

  SWA: I find it much easier to write fiction. Tandy Caide, even though there are aspects of her that I can channel, is not me. I can become her on the page and still retain my self. It’s the same with all the characters. Like Kenny, he does some really bad shit, but I’ve also felt like: I’m going to come in and save this place. These people are doing it wrong, and I’m going to be their hero. And I have felt like an angry high school girl who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, that angry existential absurdism that Hope operates in. I can personify those emotions, but they aren’t representative of me as a whole.
  You don’t want your characters to be a loosely veiled autobiography, but there is that value in figuring out what you have in common and what’s different, too.

  SWA: And that’s what takes a really long time when you’re writing a novel. You have to write almost to the end before you see what the character is faced with and what they do that is different from what you would do because the world you’ve created is different from the world you live in.

  Imagine you’re going hang gliding, and you’re running with the hang glider on the ground. You’re running, and you’re running, and you’re running. And you have to run for a long time, but at some point you’re going to get liftoff. Then the hang glider is the one that really has the kinetic energy in the air, but when you’re on the ground it’s you. Tandy Caide was more me when I started than when I ended. At some point, she gained liftoff.
  The Annie Year was once the setup for a joke and then a rejected short story. So how important is being honest when you’ve missed the mark in the writing process?

  SWA: You need to be honest about your failure, but you can’t dwell there. You have to move forward quickly and see that knowledge as an opportunity. You have to let your feelings go and be scientific about it. When I visited Washington, D.C., I was hanging out with a woman who is a huge policy writer on all things science, and she said that a negative result is still a result in science. You don’t feel bad about a negative result. It’s just a result.

  We’re very emotionally connected to our work because we’re doing emotional work. We’re trying to move people. But if your emotions are so tied up in your work that you can’t fail, then you need some distance. Then, use the information you get to move forward. I like to say, Everything you do is preparation for the next thing you do. If you’re afraid to fail, you’re not going to do shit.

The Annie Year
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

The Annie Year

Stephanie Wilbur Ash. Unnamed (PGW.dist.), $16 trade paper (246p) ISBN 978-1-939419-96-5

A lonely accountant waffles between pessimism and hope in this quirky debut. Now in her early 40s, Tandy Caide has spent virtually her whole life in the same rural Iowa town, with the exception of a brief stint at college in comparatively cosmopolitan Dubuque. She is the town's only CPA, a responsibility she takes very seriously, and she seeks out sophistication where she can find it, by attending the high school's drama productions and enjoying a fine cup of coffee at the local diner. But when the exotic new vocational agriculture teacher expresses an interest in her, Tandy is sorely tempted to risk not only her loveless marriage but even her professional reputation for an opportunity to escape to a different life. Occasionally lapsing into a second-person narration, Tandy's voice is intriguingly and deceptively complex, leading readers to glimpse the longing beneath her professional veneer. Simultaneously a character study and an exploration about the personal costs of living in a dwindling farming town increasingly marred by meth abuse, Tandy's story finally offers bittersweet, hard-won hope. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Annie Year." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444499&it=r&asid=5b1bd7c64afb48faa20d41a0b68102dc. Accessed 2 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444499

• Minneapolis Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-the-annie-year-by-stephanie-wilbur-ash/397330261/
  Word count: 582

  REVIEW: 'The Annie Year,' by Stephanie Wilbur Ash
  FICTION: In "The Annie Year" by Stephanie Wilbur Ash, a stranger disrupts the orderly life of a local businesswoman.
  By Ginny Greene Star Tribune
  October 20, 2016 — 4:28pm
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  For small-town Iowa accountant Tandy Caide, it was the year everything fell apart. Or came together.

  Tandy is a second-generation CPA who runs her daily affairs, and her little corner of town, by the book. She makes life decisions on the merits of the math. She not only minds the ledgers and tax returns of the oddball townsfolk, but also faithfully guards their scandals and secrets from the prying eyes of nosy neighbors. Her customers can tell her anything, and they do. Everyone knows Tandy Caide is a stand-up businesswoman.

  In her reproachful narrator’s voice, Tandy derides the attitudes of “you people” from “big cities along the river” who couldn’t possibly understand her complicated love/hate relationship with the place where she grew up. She is perfectly comfortable in her eccentricities. She walks around in a homely, overstuffed Lands’ End coat she scored in an eBay auction and hangs out with two retired curmudgeons who were friends of her now-dead father. Yet she is not without ambition. At one point she considers a job in the glamorous metropolis of — gasp! — Dubuque, only to realize, in a reverse Mary Tyler Moore sort of way, that she’d never make it after all.

  She wasn’t expecting a new man to blow into town and upset her comfortable equation.

  “The Annie Year,” so named for the high school musical being performed that fall, is a story rich with Midwestern insider jokes, reverence and sensibilities that anyone who’s had a taste of small-town life can relate to.

  This story is no “Tandy of Mayberry,” no portrait of a sleepy, rural paradise full of happy campers. Her backwater town has dilapidated clapboard houses and a thriving underground meth business and a main-drag hangout whose neon sign spells out a vulgarity because key letters are burned out. It is peppered with broken dreams, long-buried scandals, a scurrilous teenage pregnancy, drunks and dead-end existences. It’s easy to see how the self-disciplined accountant could find her head turned by the newly arrived, long-haired, mysterious vocational-agriculture teacher, an unlikely attraction that leads to a lustful affair that will change her life forever — or maybe just for an “Annie” year.
  Stephanie Ash
  Photo by CAITLIN ABRAMS
  Stephanie Ash

  This is a keeper, a fresh and quirky “Main Street” for the Midwest (without all that deep social commentary that got Sinclair Lewis into so much trouble). But unlike Lewis’ bleak satire and unflattering portrayal of his small Minnesota town, Minneapolis editor Stephanie Ash writes with a wry smile and an obvious adoration of Iowa small-town life. Its faux-preachy tone keeps us — snooty types from the big cities along the river — at arm’s length while Ash’s character embraces her imperfect corner of the world.

  It’s a bold first novel by Ash. We hope she makes it, after all.

  Ginny Greene is a Star Tribune copy editor.

  The Annie Year
  By: Stephanie Wilbur Ash.
  Publisher: Unnamed Press, 250 pages, $16.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephanie-wilbur-ash/the-annie-year/
  Word count: 376

  THE ANNIE YEAR
  by Stephanie Wilbur Ash
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  Tandy Caide, a dedicated CPA in small-town America, can handle the complexities of everyone’s tax returns. But can she handle an affair with the new vocational agriculture teacher?

  Ash’s debut novel brilliantly captures the slanted quirkiness of a Midwest full of small-business owners and exploding home-methamphetamine labs. For the last 25 years, Tandy has striven to live a life of integrity, always conscious of her role in the economic stability of the town. She has quarterly lunches with the Order of the Pessimists, a sodality helmed by her late father’s grumpy friends Doc and Huff, who lovingly criticize her like a daughter. Partly that’s because Huff practically disowned his own daughter, Barb, when she ran off just before high school graduation and came back pregnant. As a waitress, she’s raised Hope alone. She did pretty well until the night of this year's high school musical, Annie, when a rather inebriated Hope played a rather violent Ms. Hannigan. No longer welcome in the regular high school, Hope joins the Vo-Ag class. The night of the musical was also the night Tandy met the Vo-Ag teacher, occasionally known by his given name of Kenny Tischer. Soon Tandy and the strange Vo-Ag teacher, who wears not only a ponytail, but also wool man clogs, have embarked on a passionate romance. Meanwhile, Tandy’s obese husband, Gerald, checks himself into a mental health facility, and Hope seems to have picked up a shady job with a shady farmhand. With staccato phrasing and acerbic observations about the mundane foolishness of everyone’s lives, Ash keenly captures Tandy’s dry wit. Tandy doesn’t simply work as a CPA; she possesses an accountant’s soul, as hilariously evinced by her tallying the costs and benefits of waving to her clients and chaperoning the Vo-Ag students.

  Darkly hilarious and weirdly beguiling.
  Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-1-939419-96-5
  Page count: 246pp
  Publisher: Unnamed Press
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 3rd, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016

• Malcolm Avenue Review
  http://malcolmavenuereview.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-annie-year-stephanie-wilbur-ash.html
  Word count: 541

  Tuesday, March 7, 2017
  THE ANNIE YEAR :: Stephanie Wilbur Ash

  The following review first appeared in Shelf Awareness and is posted here with permission. I had never heard of this title or the author when I spied the description on the Shelf list for the month. It sounded so bugnuts insane I knew I had to request it and am so thankful I had the opportunity to read and review it. A wonderful, fun read, this book also contains one of the best "jokes" I've read in some time (particularly since I have the mind of an 8-year-old). Full review below.

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash is a hoot, and The Annie Year is the raucous debut novel from the former editor at Mpls.St.Paul magazine. Reading The Annie Year feels akin to pulling into a remote diner and having a lifelong local recount town history nonstop for hours, in intimate detail and regardless of subject matter sensitivity or personal embarrassment. The story is told so engagingly--caustic, awkwardly hilarious and full of the joy and anguish of everyday life--it's impossible to do anything but settle in, a willing hostage to the saga.

  Tandy Caide is the CPA of a small Midwestern town. Married to a man she's rarely intimate with, charter member of the Order of the Pessimists and patron of the arts, Tandy feels stuck. Raised to take over her father's business, she never had an opportunity to spread her wings. After sharing a moment with the new vocational-agriculture Are teacher at the high school production of Annie, Tandy's life takes a careening, two-wheels-off-the-pavement left turn.

  With his ponytail, man-clogs, freshly-mown-ditch scent and multi-colored beaded belt, the Vo-Ag teacher lights a fire in Tandy that creates fallout across town. The havoc affects both a former lover and the daughter of her estranged best friend, forcing Tandy on a voyage to find her true self.

  Through Tandy's first-person narrative, Ash has created a voice often cringe-worthy, full of introspection and admittedly fallible under the pressures of perfectionism. Readers will find Tandy's serpentine journey by turns familiar and foreign, but always entertaining.

  STREET SENSE: A smart novel with plenty of humor and life's insults, this is one to just pick up, hang on and enjoy the ride.

  A FAVORITE PASSAGE: [This quote comes from Tandy's first-person narrative while bowling with the Vo-Ag hunk. It's short, and really not one of the more meaningful passages, but I wanted to give you a flavor of Ash's sense of humor, which hit just the right smart/childish notes with me.]

  I have never been more attracted to anyone in my entire life. It was like he bowled directly into my ovaries.

  COVER NERD SAYS: I didn't find this cover particularly engaging or symbolic of what is going on inside. I did find the font matched well, and it's not a font that would normally attract me. This isn't a bad cover, I'm just not sure it does justice to the insides, which are so alive that a cover more colorful and engaging (or outlandish) would have better served.
  Posted by Malcolm Avenue Review at 2:00 AM 2 Comments

• MSU Reporter
  https://www.msureporter.com/2016/10/20/book-review-the-annie-year-is-a-story-of-dignity-integrity/
  Word count: 649

  Book review: The Annie Year is a story of dignity, integrity
  October 20, 2016 Rachael Jaeger 0 Comments

  Stephanie Wilbur Ash, creative writing Assistant Professor Geoff Herbach’s wife, has written her first novel, The Annie Year, which released in publication early October. Although she wrote based on a stereotyped small town, she wanted to reach even deeper truths in how daily life there is lived amidst struggles.

  “It’s a true work of fiction, not memoir or autobiographical fiction, so aside from the small-town setting and the fact that my character’s dad was a CPA like my dad, there are few details that would point to my personal life,” Ash wrote in an email interview. “Tandy spends time attending musical theater, one of my loves, but she does so begrudgingly.”

  It took over a decade for Ash to polish the book because of her protagonist, Tandy.

  “There is something really moving and relatable in the chip she has on her shoulder about living in her small town her whole life,” Ash said. “I simply loved the character—I couldn’t let her go.”

  During the writing process, Ash acknowledged her appreciation for her husband, Professor Herbach in his constant support of her.

  “I have had some pretty loving encouragement at home,” Ash said.

  Ash also said her inspiration stemmed from the Paul Gruchow “What We Teach Our Rural Children.” Ash said that Gruchow’s answer rested within a specific line: “If you were any good, you wouldn’t be here.” Ash added, “I think Tandy believes that, and yet, she works so hard to be good, and that pisses her off. I think even people who are not from small towns can relate to the desire to ‘be good’ while living a life of moral ambiguity. And those who are from small towns really can relate.”

  While her book explores problems such as meth addiction problem and includes a part where a high school actress is drunk onstage, she sprinkled light-hearted humor throughout the plot. Ash also has loving extended relatives in scattered small towns across the Midwest and equally enjoys the outdoors and wide open spaces. So when asked what was her story about getting away from her small town, Ash clarified her feelings on the matter.

  “I don’t feel like I ‘escaped’ my small town,” she answered. “It was not about breaking free from an oppressive regime. My leaving was about the lack of viable work for someone with my skill set and interests and curiosity.”

  Her skill set consists of reporting, writing, and editing, especially a love of the variety that she discovered was only available in large metropolitan areas. So while she possessed a fondness for her own town filled with its own memories, she realized it was time she needed to let go.

  Ash hopes when people read her book, they will learn that there is value and dignity in caring for others and in being a person of integrity, no matter where you are, as well as a value in forgiveness and acceptance.

  “In the end, in my book, the quality judgments made by Tandy are on herself, not on others individually, even those who have wronged her or her town as a whole,” Ash concluded.
  “That says a lot about her as a character, and I hope it says a lot about the people I know and love in small, rural communities.”

  Ash will host a book party at Subtext Books in St. Paul this weekend on Saturday starting a 6:30 p.m. with food and music guests A.J. Piga, Niki Becker, and Colleen and Laura Borgendale who will perform original songs from Ash’s universe in her novel The Annie Year.

• desibeauty
  http://desibeautyindia.blogspot.com/2016/10/review-annie-year-by-stephanie-wilbur.html
  Word count: 562

  Tuesday, 25 October 2016
  REVIEW: 'The Annie Year,' by Stephanie Wilbur Ash
  Stephanie Wilbur Ash

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  For residential community Iowa bookkeeper Tandy Caide, it was the year everything came apart. On the other hand met up.

  Tandy is a second-era CPA who runs her day by day undertakings, and her little corner of town, by the book. She settles on life choices on the benefits of the math. She not just personalities the records and assessment forms of the weirdo townsfolk, additionally steadfastly watches their embarrassments and mysteries from according to meddlesome neighbors. Her clients can advise her anything, and they do. Everybody knows Tandy Caide is an outstanding agent.

  In her censorious storyteller's voice, Tandy disparages the demeanors of "you individuals" from "huge urban communities along the stream" who couldn't in any way, shape or form comprehend her convoluted love/despise association with the place where she grew up. She is splendidly agreeable in her erraticisms. She strolls around in an unattractive, overstuffed Lands' End coat she scored in an eBay sale and hangs out with two resigned curmudgeons who were companions of her now-dead father. However she is not without desire. At a certain point she considers a vocation in the marvelous city of — pant! — Dubuque, just to acknowledge, in a turn around Mary Tyler Moore kind of way, that she'd never make it all things considered.

  She wasn't anticipating that another man should blow into town and miracle her agreeable condition.

  "The Annie Year," so named for the secondary school musical being played out that fall, is a story rich with Midwestern insider jokes, veneration and sensibilities that any individual who's had an essence of residential community life can identify with.

  This story is no "Tandy of Mayberry," no picture of a lethargic, country heaven loaded with upbeat campers. Her backwater town has frail clapboard houses and a flourishing underground meth business and a principle drag home base whose neon sign spells out a profanity since key letters are wore out. It is peppered with broken dreams, since quite a while ago covered outrages, an obscene high school pregnancy, drunks and deadlock presences. It's anything but difficult to perceive how the self-trained bookkeeper could discover her head turned by the recently arrived, since a long time ago haired, strange professional horticulture educator, a far-fetched fascination that prompts an indecent issue that will change her life always — or possibly only for an "Annie" year.

  Stephanie Ash

  Photograph BY CAITLIN ABRAMS

  Stephanie Ash

  This is an attendant, a crisp and particular "Principle Street" for the Midwest (without all that profound social editorial that got Sinclair Lewis into so much inconvenience). In any case, not at all like Lewis' disheartening parody and unflattering depiction of his little Minnesota town, Minneapolis supervisor Stephanie Ash composes with a wry grin and an undeniable worship of Iowa residential community life. Its artificial sermonizing tone keeps us — self important sorts from the enormous urban areas along the stream — at a manageable distance while Ash's character grasps her defective corner of the world.

  It's a strong first novel by Ash. We trust she makes it, all things considered.