Ellen Cooney

Ellen Cooney started writing fiction during the Great Northeast Blizzard of 1978 while procrastinating her M.A. thesis on Virginia Woolf, and also procrastinating the decision to accept an offer in a Ph.D. program. She had thought she'd be a poet who earned a living as an academic, and now and then wrote a play. She'd been publishing poems since the age of seven; in her childhood and adolescence, it was rare for her schools to produce plays she hadn't written. She never made the choice to be a novelist and story writer. It was, "What am I doing here? Oh, sentences. Making up stuff in sentences." Fiction took over in the form of a story about a bomb shelter, and it took over so completely, she didn't know the blizzard was going on until she looked up at a wall of white on the other side of her window. No Ph.D. The story became her first novel, "Small Town Girl," about a bomb shelter and a girl poet.

Her early impulse to have a relationship with fiction as a medium where the stuff of poetry and plays could happen along with a story never left her, and for that she's grateful. In a radio interview promoting one of her books, the interviewer asked her if she felt comfortable with being described as a writer who "thinks outside the box" (which he'd just done). It was the first time she heard the phrase. After a few uncomfortable beats of dead air, she had to ask, "What box?" and that sums up everything about how she writes.

She was born in 1952 in Clinton, Massachusetts, and the whole time she was growing up she was the only writer she knew. Besides her seven novels, she's the author of short stories published in The New Yorker and many literary journals, including Glimmer Train, The Literary Review, Epoch, and Ontario Review. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. She taught creative writing for over 25 years, most recently as writer in residence at MIT. She now lives in mid-coast Maine, where she's completing a new novel, "The Starlight," about a Sears kit house in the early nineteen-thirties.