BY FAYE M. DASEN: Features Editor

Author Silas House says he has wanted to write for as long as he can remember.

“I was just born that way,” he says in an e-mail interview with The Pilot, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the seventh grade solidified his determination to do just that.

“That book moved me and changed me so much, and I wanted to do the same for readers,” he says. “If I’m not writing, I’m not happy.”

House will be at the Country Bookshop on Sunday, Oct. 3 at 3 p.m. to read from and sign copies of his new book “The Coal Tattoo.”

This novel about two sisters is his third. The first two, “A Parchment of Leaves” and “Clay’s Quilt,” were very well received by the public.

Writing about the relationships between family members comes easily to House, who grew up in a close-knit home with plenty of extended family nearby.

House says he was able to get inside the heads of sisters Easter and Anneth rather easily.

“This book in particular is based on my mother and her sister, my aunt Sis,” he says. “My mother was orphaned when she was nine. Sis was 19, so she took on some of the raising responsibilities of my mother. By the time I was a child, they had this strange, intriguing relationship in that they were like mother and daughter, but also had a sister-relationship.”

House says that this often led to some big arguments, one of which he’s never forgotten.

“One time in particular I remember this one fight that I thought they’d never recover from,” he says. “Sis was trying to boss my mother around, my mother wouldn’t take it, and it got out of hand. They yelled at each other, said terrible things to one another. But the next morning I came into the kitchen and there they sat, drinking coffee and laughing.

“After Sis left I asked my mother how they managed to make up so easily. ‘Sisters don’t make up,’ she said. ‘They just go back to the way things were.’ That really struck me as a great representation of unconditional love.”

House says the whole book grew out of his mother’s reply, and he uses the line in his book.

“When I’m writing about women, I just try to see the world through their eyes,” he says. “I try to think about how their experiences are different from my own. I believe a man has to really respect and admire women to write about them vividly and correctly. I was raised to respect women and always be aware of their strength, so I think that helps me to capture women on the page. And frankly, I’m fascinated by women, so it’s always fun to write about them.”

House says North Carolina author Lee Smith has been good and generous to him since he first worked with her at a writers’ workshop.

“Ever since then she’s just taken me under her wing and been incredibly giving,” he says. “I’ve dedicated my new book to her because of all she has done for me. She went far beyond the call of duty. I don’t know any other writer who has helped as many other emerging writers as Lee has.”

Until recently, House was a rural mail carrier, but he also writes profiles on musicians such as LeeAnn Womack and Delbert McClinton for a music magazine.

“I have always lived a life wrapped in music,” he says. “I have had the best time writing about these musicians.”

House was born, raised in, and now lives his wife and two daughter in the same county near the border of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia in Eastern Kentucky. He went to college at a small Methodist college before transferring to Eastern Kentucky University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He then earned a master’s in fine arts in creative writing from Spaulding University in Louisville, Ky.

“My parents are Donald and Betty House,” he says. “My father is a Vietnam veteran and worked for 30 years in a fiberglass factory. My mother retired from the elementary school cafeteria, a job she took because she couldn’t stand to send me to school without her.”

House has a sister, Dana, and two cousins, Terry and Eleshia, who, he says, are just like a brother and sister.