Claire Davis is the author of two novels, Season of the Snake (2005), and Winter Range (2001), which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for Fiction (MPBA) and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award (PNBA). Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Best American Short Stories.

Davis’ collection of short stories, Labors of the Heart (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), is comprised of stories centered around conflict over “intimacy, estrangement, and family secrets” which first appeared in major literary journals and award-winning anthologies. Her stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, to name a few, and have been read on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts.”

A resident of Lewisboro, Idaho, Davis teaches writing at Lewis-Clark State College. Davis and fellow writer Kim Barnes, a novelist and author of two memoirs, recently co-edited Kiss Tomorrow Hello (Doubleday, 2006), a collection of essays by women writers about the experience of aging and how each handles different aspects of entering this new stage of life. The twenty-five essays in Kiss Tomorrow Hello include works by Pam Houston, Antoya Nelson, Joyce Maynard, Joy Passante, Lauren Slater, and, of course, Davis herself, among others.

Derek Alger: For those who associate you as a writer from the west, they might be surprised to learn where you were born and raised.

Author Claire Davis

DA: Did you start writing at an early age?

CD: I started writing stories at about eight or nine years of age, as soon as I could reasonably put pen to paper. I’d be frustrated that books I read would end, so I’d pick up and write new endings, or sequels. When I was nine, I read Jack London and realized that that was what I wanted to do with my life. No. More than that, I believed I could do it. And so I was soon making up my own adventures on the page. Of course, looking back, the whole thing seems absolutely improbable, and I can’t help but wonder what it is in us that defies commonsense and says, instead, “You can do this.”

DA: What prompted you to decide to attend college at a later age than most?

CD: I finally quit Wisconsin Telephone when I was pregnant with my son, Brian. As a stay at home mother, I did what I’d always intended to do. Write. So, I wrote some God-awful novels at 620 pages with only a third of the story told and I realized I needed to get some help on this thing called the novel. I returned to college as soon as my son was old enough to go full time to school.

DA: You eventually ended up in Olympia, Washington.

CD: Yes. It was on the heels of a painful divorce and custody battle, and to tell the truth, I wanted some distance on that part of my life. When I heard about a year old program called “The Experience of Fiction” at Evergreen State College, I packed up my son and what was left of my household, and moved West.

DA: Then it was on to Missoula, Montana.

CD: For their graduate program in creative writing, which was the best possible choice for me, as I not only learned the art, but learned where my heart resides in the work — this amazing landscape and the way it informs the lives of the people, which was what my first novel, Winter Range, was ultimately about. But while I was in school, I also worked at a book store, worked initially for a state wide literary arts organization, first as a volunteer and finally as the director of Hell Gate Writers. Don’t you love the West and their penchant for the dramatic? Back in Wisconsin, the streets are named: Maple or Washington, or Cherry. Out here, it’s Rattlesnake Grade, or Hells Gate. My son went to Hells Gate High School. I’d have given a lot to graduate from a school with that name on the back of a leather jacket.