The first time I set foot in Indiana was in the spring of 2019 when I arrived in South Bend for a job interview. As part of the elaborate, multi-day interview—typical for academic jobs—I was paired up with a local real estate agent who took me on a tour of the area. During our conversation, she said something like, “There are a lot of housing options in Michiana,” and I stopped her and said, “Michiana?” She explained that the geographic region of northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan around South Bend was known as Michiana, a portmanteau of Michigan and Indiana. At that instant, I had a vision—or as much of a vision as I’ve ever had. Perhaps it was more of an inkling, but here’s what I knew: I would move here, and I would write a novel with the word Michiana in the title.
I moved to the South Bend area with my family, in the fall of 2019, and then, in the middle of my second semester at my new job, we went into lockdown due to the pandemic—along with the rest of the country and, indeed, the world. And this was the impetus that led me to start writing my novel, which eventually came to be titled The Animatronic Geese of Michiana. In other words, it was setting—a very particular geographic place in a very extraordinary time—that first drew me into the lives of my three protagonists: a queer high school freshman battling homophobia and self-doubt, a Millennial writer and mother struggling to keep her marriage together, and a recluse in his sixties desperately trying to protect his elderly mother and mentally ill brother from the virus. Exploring the personal and political turmoil of the pandemic, my novel asks probing questions about constructions of identity and examines what happens when conflicting worldviews collide.
My preoccupation with place is also evident in my creative nonfiction. My most recent book, a collection of essays titled The Season of Birds and Stones, engages with the natural world in national parks and other wild places. My essays explore encounters with bears, arctic ground squirrels, loons, red-winged blackbirds, moose, and wolves, as I wrestle with a range of subjects including motherhood, mental illness, grief, and darkness. My earlier book, Xylotheque, a memoir-in-essays that is also deeply rooted in place, won the Sarton Memoir Award, was a finalist for the Women Writing the West WILLA Literary Award, and was a semifinalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature.
My first book, a short story collection titled A Catalogue of Everything in the World, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award, also concerns itself with place. I wrote the book shortly after moving to Nebraska, where I became preoccupied with questions of what it means to be from a particular location and how identity and setting are intertwined. As someone who has lived in a lot of places—I was born in Russia to a Russian mother and American father, and have since lived in California, Virginia, Nebraska, Connecticut, and Indiana—I am fascinated by the ways that environment shapes identity.
My fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Terrain, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Blue Mesa Review, The Fourth River, Glimmer Train, Witness, Short Reads, River Styx, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. I’ve been artist-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, Isle Royale National Park, and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. I hold an MFA in fiction from George Mason University and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I teach creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you The Animatronic Geese of Michiana in the summer of 2028.
