Life
She returned with her mother to their logging camp on Orofino Creek in the Clearwater National Forest, where her father worked as a lumberjack. For the next twelve years, she and her family lived in the small communities and cedar camps of northern Idaho—Pierce, Headquarters, and a number of places along the North Fork of the Clearwater River. In 1970, the family moved to Lewiston, Idaho, where Barnes graduated from Lewiston High School in 1976.
Barnes received her BA in English from Lewis-Clark State College in 1983, her MA in English from Washington State University in 1985, and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 1995. Barnes teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho, and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain in Idaho. They have three children.
The subject matter of Barnes's creative work includes the American West, religious fundamentalism, women's issues, logging, and the environment. In A Country Called Home, one of her main characters has the condition known as synesthesia and sees color when she hears music.
Her work has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE Magazine, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
Read more about this topic: Kim Barnes
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
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“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
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“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)