Norma Shainin was born in New York City and, as a child, was known to chew on books. Graduating as an English Major from Hunter College, she was employed at the McGraw-Hill and Macmillan Publishing Companies before being dragged kicking and screaming to the Pacific Northwest (“so much water and so little to swim in”). In Seattle she worked for Sunset magazine and the University of Washington printing plant, but currently resides in the rural and critter-filled setting of the Skagit Valley.
She began seriously writing fiction in 1977, taking classes first with Annie Dillard and later with Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, James Welch and Marilynne Robinson. Her story, “Spring,” was accepted for the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and another was included recently in New Millennium Writings. The character in “The Famous Writer” is a not-so-generous, more exaggerated amalgam of those teachers.
After a stint as prop master for the indie film, “Apart From That,” she retreated back to less-rigorous novel writing, and has just completed work on a book loosely based on the life of Isamu Noguchi titled The Long View