A note of farewell from Mill Creek Stories
By Molly Dugger Brennan | Illustration by Lindsey Richards Barnes
I started writing stories as soon as I could print. I really think my first story was written in crayon, and I am sure it was about a dog. I won some essay contests in school, but I cannot brag. It was an itsy-bitsy school. My graduating class was 21 people, so there wasn’t a ton of competition.
No matter what my actual pay-the-mortgage career was at the time, writing is what kept me sane. Somehow, telling the story to others always made things clearer to me. It helped me process the world and all its enthusiastic joy and all its soul-sucking trauma. That is not overly dramatic. The first entity to pay me for my writing was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
I hit the job market in 1979, which for you newbies was a monster of a recession. No one was hiring and if they did, it was one out of 200 applicants for every job. To get gas in your car was a two-hour ordeal because you had to wait in lines that circled the block. More than once, I’d been in line for over an hour only to be told they just ran out of gas and there would be no more until Tuesday, like I had enough gas to get to work until next Tuesday. I was determined not to move back home because that would make me feel like a failure. In that hardship, the CIA offered me a decent job and I grabbed it. It turned out to be a real education.
Your writing had to be clear, concise, and most importantly, compelling. No frills. Ghastly things were happening and you needed to tell people who were too busy to read it and didn’t know why they should care. Editors were differently abled. Some were amazing and some were nightmares from hell itself. I had one manager who couldn’t give me any editing advice, couldn’t describe the goal, didn’t articulate what he needed, but repeated like a geriatric parrot, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
At the far opposite end of the spectrum, the best editor I’ve ever worked with was Kurt Rheinheimer, the former editor at this very magazine. Kurt started editing Blue Ridge Country when God himself was a boy, so he was extremely experienced. Kurt was very careful not to alter the personality of any story, honoring the “vibe” but always making it a little more efficient, a little more clear. A little more concise. Just a bit more compelling.
Kurt retired recently, and he will be missed at this magazine, but he’s given me an idea. I am following his lead and I am retiring, too. This is my last column here at Blue Ridge Country.
Thank you, dear friends, for making this a wonderful adventure. I loved all the fan letters, the stories, and the support, and I am grateful to you for them. I wish you all the best.
The story above first appeared in our May/June 2026 issue.
