More with Brenda Marshall

2 mins read

…Continued from a previous post

Brenda Marshall: I was born on a farm in the Red River Valley of eastern North Dakota, and grew up climbing trees, riding my pony, and daydreaming under a wide prairie sky. I left North Dakota after college, and have since lived in Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and for the past fourteen years, Michigan. I have a Ph.D. in English, and teach part-time in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

My (unlawfully wedded) spouse of twenty-five years, Valerie, and I live in the country near Ann Arbor, with two horses, two dogs, and one cat. When not writing or teaching, I might be trying to improve my nascent woodworking skills, riding horse, working in my vegetable garden, helping out in Valerie’s huge perennial garden, reading, exercising at the gym, listening to opera, or planning trips, some of which I actually take. No matter where I am living or what I am doing, I think of myself as a North Dakotan.

Here’s how Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl, describes Dakota, or What’s a Heaven For?:

“A nineteenth-century epic. Imagine a Midwestern Middlemarch, if you will, that conjures the Gilded Age in a succession of sweeping panoramas and intimate portraits. Brenda Marshall puts me in mind of an American Sarah Waters, a writer at once in persuasive command of history and simultaneously able to slip beneath its skin to the story beneath. This is a vibrant, teeming work, filled with feeling, intelligence and ultimately, grace.”

Feel free to email Brenda here: bkm@brendamarshallauthor.com