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Ingrid Hill is the author of the short story collection Dixie Church Interstate Blues and the novel, Ursula, Under. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa and has twice received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has twelve children, including two sets of twins. She lives in Iowa City.
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Among its other qualities,
Ursula, Under is a tour de force of historical detail. How did you
amass the knowledge that enabled you to write so richly of Chinese, Finnish,
and immigrant experiences?
When I was left a single mom with eleven children, I had to get a career
to support them, so I went back to graduate school to be able to teach
literature and writing at the college level. I needed two foreign languages
as part of this program, and I was feeling a bit heady with both the
impossibility and the necessity of this, so I asked for Swedish first. My
father was Swedish-American, a sea captain, and I'd always wanted to study
Swedish but never had a chance. As part of my program, I got to study in
Sweden, and the Swedish history and culture classes really intrigued me,
especially the era of Gustavus Adolphus.
I met my second husband in a writers' group here and we became friends.
He went to China for a year to teach English teachers at a university there,
and he invited me to visit. I was hooked. I had no explanation for my
immediate and unexpected love for China, but in retrospect I think it was
the enforced simplicity...
Susan Barker is the author of four books. Her third novel, The Incarnations, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews' Top Ten Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Ursula, Under
Try:
The Incarnations
by Susan Barker
Nomi Eve is the author of Henna House and The Family Orchard, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award.
She has an MFA in fiction writing from Brown University and ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
Ursula, Under
Try:
The Family Orchard
by Nomi Eve
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