Heidi Jon Schmidt

http://heidijonschmidt.com

I was born on Staten Island, New York, to very young parents who dreamed of raising five children on a farm. Soon I had four younger siblings, and we moved out of the city to a crumbling stone house down a long dirt road, where we raised sheep and chickens and became ever more “eccentric”—bankrupt that is, and peculiar. I began writing fiction when I was very young, trying to make some sense of it all.

My first stories were published in The Atlantic while I was at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and when I graduated from Iowa I was offered a year’s fellowship at the...