Biography
Rilla Askew was born in southeastern Oklahoma in 1951, the descendent of coal miners and sharecroppers, bootleggers and Baptist deacons, coon hunters, school teachers, Choctaws and Cherokees, one deputy county sheriff, and a long line of pioneer women, all of whom make their way in one form or another into her fiction.
All of Rilla Askew's novels to date, Strange Business (1992), The Mercy Seat (1997), and Fire in Beulah (2001) are situated in her home state of Oklahoma. She was born in the foothills of the Sans Bois Mountains in 1951, a fifth generation citizen of her state. The western landscape and history that is a part of Askew's heritage lives on in her imagination and her work. The Mercy Seat is based on Askew's own family's relocation from Kentucky, and many incidents materialize into fiction from a distant past that was kept alive through family stories. Askew's deep connection to her surroundings is evident everywhere in her work. In The Mercy Seat, she says, "This country. Oklahoma. The very sound of it is home."
Askew grew up in the oil company town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, lived all over the state, including long stints in Tulsa (where she received her BFA in Theatre Performance from the University of Tulsa) and the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, as well as in parts of California and Arkansas. Askew originally moved to New York in 1980 to become an actress, but turned instead to writing plays and fiction. In 1987 she enrolled in the creative writing program at Brooklyn College, where she received her MFA. Critical and popular response to her work was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, her first book, The Mercy Seat, winning the Oklahoma Book Award. Her most recent novel Fire in Beulah deals with race and oil in Oklahoma in the early 1920s.
She has taught fiction writing at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, the University of Central Oklahoma, and a variety of literary conferences. Currently she and her husband, actor Paul Austin, divide their time between the Sans Bois hills of southeastern Oklahoma and the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.

The Mercy Seat
Book Description from amazon.com
The Mercy Seat is a powerful novel, rich with biblical allusions and authoritative, haunting depictions of the landscape and life of the American West in the second half of the 19th century. The story begins as a young girl, Mattie, is called from sleep to help her father prepare for her family's flight from their Kentucky home, its pie safe and its oak bed frames. Reasons for their sudden departure are only slowly revealed and never completely explained.
The center of the evolving story is the conflict between Mattie's father and his brother. John Lodi is skilled in the art of blacksmithing and gun making; Fayette Lodi is anxious to use that skill to turn a profit for himself. Although the brothers travel west together and eventually settle in the same corner of Oklahoma in the valley of the San Bois Mountains, they have no shared ideas on how to create new lives for themselves or their families. Violence eventually erupts, but it goes beyond the two brothers to infect their wives, their children, and the very land they inhabit.
It is a story that mirrors that of Cain and Abel, yet its biblical echo is only one of the features which make this multilayered, beautifully crafted novel so enjoyable. There are hints of Faulkner, too, as Askew employs his technique of using a number of voices to tell the story: there is Mattie herself, mother before her time to her younger siblings, yet refusing to mature into a woman; there is Thula Henry, Choctaw woman who both understands Mattie's gifts and tries to exorcise her demons; and Grady Dewberry, loquacious son of John's employer recalling events that marked his childhood.
This is more than just a simple repositioning of the Snopes from Mississippi to Oklahoma, however. It is a vision of the settling of America with a deep and abiding appreciation for the combustible elements that participated in it. Evangelical preachers riding their circuits, Native Americans pushed farther and farther west, former slaves freed from their masters but not from prejudice, and white men on the run from the law of the more settled East, all figure prominently. Some patience is required as the central tragedy looms, but for the most part, the novel is poignant, gripping, and even heartbreaking. --K.A. Crouch

Reading Group Guide for The Mercy Seat
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/mercy_seat.html

Discussion Questions for The Mercy Seat
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Strange Business
Strange Business is a collection of linked stories that won the 1993 Oklahoma Book Award.

Fire in Beulah
Book Description from amazon.com
Rilla Askew's first novel, The Mercy Seat, which was lauded as "powerful" and "arresting" by The New York Times Book Review and "an extraordinary story" by the Boston Globe proved that she was not afraid to tackle big, primal American themes. Her newest, Fire in Beulah, set in the same heartland territory as The Mercy Seat, is a chronicle of race, greed, and moral choice in the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush. At its center is the complex relationship between Althea Whiteside-an oil wildcatter's high-strung wife who escaped from a hardscrabble childhood-and her enigmatic black maid, Graceful. Both are caught in the relentless currents of family and violence. Their contrapuntal stories-and those of others close to them-unfold against a volatile backdrop of fear, hate, and lynchings that climax in the Tulsa race riot of 1921, during which whites burn the city's prosperous black section to the ground. The conflagration of the riot becomes the crucible that melds and tests each of the characters; their story is the American story of race, a tale that declares the simple truth that we are irrevocably tied to one another. Read an exerpt.

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