Page 5 - May/June HER 2020

5 MAY HER
HER Feature
A writer at heart
An ongoing quest of the creative process
Story by Felisha Butler, photography submitted
Sitting in her parent’s kitchen overlooking Lake Hamilton, 7-year-old Stephanie Storey put pencil to paper and coined her first story titled “Horty the Hog Goes to School.” The rest is history, as the Lakeside alumna has gone on to produce in California over the years debuting her first novel “Oil and Marble” in 2016, featured on Hudson Booksellers Best Books of 2016, and her second, “Raphael, Painter in Rome” hit the shelves last month.
“We’re Razorbacks, so of course the protagonist had to be a little pig,” she laughed. “I illustrated him and did a whole series of them — Horty the hog went to school, he went to the dentist, he went skiing. He did all kinds of things. I have written every day since I was seven. Every single day, including on my wedding day. I got up in the morning before the dress went on and wrote just a little bit of fiction.”
While earning a fine arts degree, a mixture of studio art and art histo- ry, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Storey seized the chance to spend a semester at the University of Pisa in Italy where she fell in love with Michelangelo and the Italian Renaissance.
“I went to go get my Ph.D. in art history in the Italian Renaissance, and I studied under one of the top Michelangelo specialists in the world — William Wallace at Washington University but I did not last in that Ph.D. program,” she said. “I figured out that academics don’t like it when you make stuff up so I left to go write fiction and went to Emerson College
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