


Still drawn to the written word, she asked one of her professors what she should do at this point with her writing. But after graduation, her interests shifted to museum work and she took a secretarial position with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.Ī year later, she entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin where she earned a Masters of Arts in American Studies. While at the University of Virginia, she wrote for the student paper, The Cavalier Daily, and held an internship at the Nashville Banner. Gregg Gilmore knew at an early age that she wanted to write but was soon drawn to journalism not fiction. Although her artist mother bought her daughter her first easel and box of paints when she was five, it was her fathers love of family storytelling that captured their young daughters attention. Susan Gregg Gilmore was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1961. Intelligent, charming, and utterly readable, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen marks the debut of a talented new literary voice. As a series of extraordinary events alter her perspective and sweeping changes come to Ringgold itself Catherine Grace begins to wonder if her place in the world may actually be, against all odds, right where she began. But before things have even begun to get off the ground in Atlanta, tragedy brings Catherine Grace back home. And when, with the help of a family friend, the dream becomes a reality, she immediately packs her bags, leaving her family and the boy she loves to claim the life she's always imagined. The daughter of Ringgold's third-generation Baptist preacher, Catherine Grace is quick-witted, more than a little stubborn, and dying to escape her small-town life.Įvery Saturday afternoon, she sits at the Dairy Queen, eating Dilly Bars and plotting her getaway to Atlanta.

The town of Ringgold, Georgia, has a population of 1,923, one traffic light, one Dairy Queen, and one Catherine Grace Cline.

Sometimes you have to return to the place where you began, to arrive at the place where you belong.
