Phillips's parents divorced in 1972, an event she explored in her first short-story collection,
Sweethearts, which was published on her twenty-fourth birthday. Phillips continued to write short stories and began to teach at Humboldt State University in California. She won the St. Lawrence Award for fiction in 1978 for
Counting, her second short-story collection.
The short stories in Black Tickets, Phillips' first effort for a commercial press, fall into three basic categories: very short stories, interior monologues by damaged misfits from the fringes of society, and longer stories about family life. In these stories, noted Michael Adams in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, "Phillips explores the banality of horror and the horror of the banal through her examination of sex, violence, innocence, loneliness, illness, madness, various forms of love and lovelessness," and lack of communication. These stories were drawn, observed James N. Baker of Newsweek, "from observations she made in her rootless days on the road," in the mid-1970s when she wandered from West Virginia to California and back again, "then developed in her imagination."
"Most of the stories in Black Tickets," stated Thomas R.
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