Andrea Barrett
Andrea Barrett
Andrea Barrett is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel was a finalist for the 2013 Story Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
writing carpe-diem people
It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.
writing self breathing
Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.
dark evil mysterious
Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.
character eye memorable
Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated by her memorable characters and the perfectly paced revelations of their surprising relationships.
way facts different
I'm not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence ... are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.
grew
I grew up on Cape Cod. We didn't live right on the water, but I could walk to it and did every day.
mark ways
I think the landscape you grow up in probably does mark you in ways you don't even understand.
life
I've never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn't even go to my prom.
felt life people
All my life, books have felt alive; some more so than people, or rather, some people. Alive - this has to do with me, I know, and not the books - in a way that some people aren't. Alive as teachers, alive as minds, alive as imaginative triggers.
although english fabulous high horrible junior might school skip someday sophomore teacher year
By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That's actually when I started writing, although I didn't think of it then as something I might someday do.
dialogue familiar leading materials
For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.
closest hugely human nature onto tend trait writers
I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.
act book constant less normal saw searching time whenever
I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.
fiction happens hard naturally recommend writers
I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.