My work springs from forgotten details of the historical past. Scientists once believed swallows hibernated at the bottom of lakes; Russian monks aboard a ship in the arctic claimed they saw Judas Iscariot adrift on an ice floe; Harlem was a savannah not too long ago, and PT Barnum hosted a buffalo hunt in Brooklyn. What was in those 18th century scientists’ cabinets? Who were those monks and what could they have been doing in the arctic? What manner of wildlife wandered the Harlem grasslands? I catch details that flash with poetic possibility and harness the imaginative worlds that spring up around them. I build novels for these worlds to live in.
My work has recently appeared in In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, Inkwell, and Lumina. I received the 2003 Dana Portfolio Award, given for three book-length manuscripts, and was a finalist in the 2004 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. I was awarded a 2010 residency at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program and a 2011 artist residency at Galleri Svalbard.
I complement my literary life with rigorous work in the wild. I was a field biologist in a remote bird refuge in southeast Alaska, and an assistant hiking guide in the arctic and in Big Sur, California. I worked in a fish cannery, as a hot springs caretaker, a deckhand on a wooden boat, and with the San Francisco Estuary Institute, scouring the shores of San Francisco Bay for the exotic oyster species Crassostrea gigas.
For a stroll in my world, please visit my blog.
I also am a freelance editor specializing in book development and all levels of technical and literary editing. Click here for my full editing résumé.
Recent editing projects
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday
Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky with
Connie Burk