About the Author
Paula Nangle was raised by missionaries in the United States and southern Africa and lives in Benton Harbor, Michigan with her husband
and two children. A graduate of Western Michigan University's MFA program, she works as a psychiatric nurse, and has published fiction
in Michigan Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review, Primavera, and Weber Studies. Her story, "Swabs,"
in Glimmer Train's Spring 2006 issue, was listed in Best American Short Stories' "100 Most Distinguished Stories of 2006."
Why I Wrote The Leper Compound
I constructed the book around several particularly strong images that remained clear in my mind and seemed best told through one voice.
A few years after Zimbabwe’s independence, my father and I were invited to tea at the home of a nationalistic schoolteacher. There
were several people there who told us how we were protected during the war, and disclosed events that we had not known about. It was
a relieved, almost happy time, and the underlying malice in the chapter “The Last Day at Nyadzi” evolved out of that. I remember wondering
what could have happened differently and under what circumstances.
As a psychiatric nurse, I seem to have acquired a technique for subduing scenes of violence and discomfort in my own mind, setting
them aside, or viewing them clearly from a distance. This has always seemed essential, since, due to confidentiality, one is unable
to talk about events that occur at work, or in patients’ lives. In the same way, living in the United States after Africa also requires,
even demands, a certain renouncement of all things once familiar. Writing The Leper Compound has allowed me to fictionalize some of
the crises I’ve witnessed, and to feel familiar again in a place that has mattered so much to me.