I didn't have much else to prove to anybody if I could just get Winter Birds published. A second novel, Dream Boy , was published by Algonquin in 1995. Even darker than Winter Birds , Dream Boy is not without hope, and reaches out to many impoverished readers. The majority of gay novels are about urban settings, and they're not about adolescents. What's out there now is a Northeastern, prep school point of view.
Religion is one.
Grimsley considers himself a spiritual person and a Christian, but not religious in the traditional Southern Baptist sense of the word. The church was really important to me when I was growing up, and it was such a pervasive influence. Christian teachings, Christian mysteries, not the church, have stayed important to me. I don't think I'll ever shake those very powerful Bible stories that I got so often and so young that they've become part of how I write. My Drowning , published in 1997, shows Grimsley's range.