Her entry begins:I'm reading Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Ant-- to a fiction writer who is fascinated with everyday human life, this study of everyday insect life is riveting and strangely moving. Maeterlinck describes the goings on in an ant community with such interest and respect he might as well be speaking of human society. The larvae are "not unlike Egyptian mummies in their coffins of sycamore, with gilded masks;" the fertilized female "discards her four wings, which fall at her feet like a wedding-gown at the close of the feast," and the...[read on]Among the early praise for The House on Oyster Creek:
"Here is that rare book: wise, hilarious, and heart-breaking. A book so full of its own life,of deep, lived-life truths, that when I put it down I was lost in my own living room, under its spell for days.Heidi Jon Schmidt's earlier books include The Rose Thieves, Darling?, and The Bride of Catastrophe, all available in paperback. Her stories have been published in The Atlantic, Grand Street, Agni Review, Yankee, and many other magazines, and anthologized in The O'Henry Awards, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Grand Street Reader and others.Here is a love story and a story of a marriage. A story of 'summer people' and townies. Of tides and the tugs we feel toward running away, into the horizon a love affair promises. But Schmidt runs us into new directions of the heart. Here is no Anna Karenina, no train-wreck, but an Anna who makes something else, much as it hurts, of her longing.
I am thrusting this book into the hands of everyone I love!"
--Sarah Blake, author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Postmistress
Visit Heidi Jon Schmidt's website.
Writers Read: Heidi Jon Schmidt.
--Marshal Zeringue
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