Debra Murphy was raised in Champaign, IL and received her B.A. in History at the University of Illinois. She met her husband, Daniel, while on a study year abroad in Austria. Though her ambition from her teenage years was to write fiction, Debra’s first priority was mothering a growing family, and she didn’t start writing in earnest until her late thirties. Debra’s first short story, “Yardsticks,” won the 1998 Kay Snow award sponsored by Willamette Writers, and was published in the Winter issue (no. 37) of Image.
Debra’s debut novel, The Mystery of Things, a mystery-thriller with Catholic and literary themes, was published in December 2004 by Idylls Press, the small press started by Debra with the mission of “publishing the Catholic imagination.” The Mystery of Things is the first novel in Debra’s planned Ashland Grail Cycle. Debra is working on the second book in the series, All the World’s a Stage, as well as a “cozy” mystery set in Ashland, a screenplay, and various shorter essays.
In writing The Mystery of Things, Debra has drawn on her life-long love of Shakespeare, mythopoeic literature and mystery/suspense thrillers. An earlier draft of the novel was selected as one of the top ten finalists in the 2000 Pacific Northwest Writers Association fiction contest.
Debra is a contributing editor for Godspy, where she publishes reviews and op-ed pieces on contemporary faith and culture. An avid moviegoer and Shakespeare fan, Debra is also also a film reviewer for bardolatry, a website devoted to Shakespeare-on-film and Catholic Film Reviews. Debra is also editor of Catholic Fictiont and an e-mail newsletter called Quotes for Catholic Writers. Her homepage/blog is at DebraMurphy.com.
A member of Willamette Writers, Oregon Writers Colony and Sisters-in-Crime, Debra lives in Ashland, Oregon with her husband and six children.
Debra in print:
Fiction
- The Mystery of Things (novel, Idylls Press 2004)
- “Yardsticks” (short story, Image Journal no. 37, Winter 2002-2003)
Non-Fiction
- “The Martha and Mary of Parenting” (first published in the U.S. in the early ‘90s by the Daughters of St. Paul in their Family magazine, then reprinted in the April 1994 (vol. 15, NO. 3) issue of the British journal, The Sower}
- “The Family, a Small Circle of Love” (first published in—if Debra is remembering correctly—The National Catholic Register in the early ’90s.
- “Bush vs. Kerry: Holding My Nose in November,” (GodSpy, August 2004)
- “Pretty as a Picture: a Review of Thérèse” (Godspy, December 2004)
- “Wrestling with the Angel of Strangeness: The Passion of the Christ one year later” (Godspy, March 2005)
- “John Paul the Great, the Misunderstood Pope” (Godspy, April 2005)
- “Cracking Shakespeare’s Catholic Code: an Interview with Claire Asquith” (Godspy, November 2005)
- “Mel Gibson: Signs and Contradictions” (Godspy, December 2006)
- “A Christian Looks at the Fiction of Ian McEwan” (Issue 10, 2008, of Second Spring Journal, and reprinted online at Catholic Exchange)
Q & A with Debra about The Mystery of Things
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