Tricia Bauer - Biography

Selected Works

Fiction

A novel in vignettes, Father Flashes, won the first Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction. In the book’s foreword, Carole Maso writes “I think of the novel as a form – its elasticity, its capacity to create wonder and terror and beauty.”

Shelterbelt

"Bauer tells a heartfelt and humorous story about a young girl's journey toward self-discovery and the meaning of family." Booklist

Hollywood & Hardwood

"Bauer's prose flexes with the narrative muscle of a veteran author... The real delight here, however, is Bauer's graceful and tender exploration of two people with extraordinary dreams finding happiness in plain, ordinary ways." Publishers Weekly

Boondocking

"The promise of Bauer's quietly acute story collection, Working Women, is movingly realized in this contemporary odyssey of a retired couple who journey with their young grandaughter through America amid upcropping dangers and fears." Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Working Women and Other Stories

"The author's real focus is on the subtle discoveries that shape our ideas about ourselves -- about what we are and what we may become...Ms. Bauer's prose is as unpretentious as most of her characters, but its accumulation of simple, apparently artless detail sometimes leads to surprising depths, abrupt revelations of life's possibilities as well as its pain." The New York Times Book Review

Quick Links

Purchase books through your local independent bookseller.

Purchase books online through Barnes & Noble.

Authors Guild

E-mail me at readermail@triciabauer.com

Biography

PUBLICATIONS

Fiction and poetry published in Western Humanities Review, Calyx, American Literary Review, First, The Carolina Quarterly, Kalliope, The Massachusetts Review, The Black Warrior Review, The American Voice, Hawaii Pacific Review, Indiana Review, Fiction Network, The Ohio Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Epoch, Blue Buildings, The Smith and in anthologies published by Crossing Press (Eating Our Hearts Out), and New Rivers Press (The Next Parish Over).

Nonfiction travel features published in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, Paris.

HONORS

2002 Finalist, The Chesterfield Writer's Film Project, Paramount Pictures, Santa Monica, CA

1998, Writing residency, Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Spain

1997/1998 Boondocking selected in B&N's Discover Great New Writers program; named one of Best First Novels by Library Journal; one of eight books named to Kirkus Reviews' Annual List of the Also Deserving

Pushcart Prize nominee

READINGS AND WORKSHOPS (representative)

The Poetry Center of the West Side Y, New York City
The Writers Community, New York City
Le Cafe Figaro, New York City
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
The Community College of Philadelphia
The University of Hartford
Dutchess Community College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Barnes & Noble, various East Coast locations
Bibelot, Baltimore, MD
Borders, K Street, Washington, D.C.
RJ Julia, Madison, CT

EMPLOYMENT

Vice President, Special Markets and Rights 2005-2021;
Director of Special Markets June 1998 -2005
for children's educational book publisher, The Rosen Publishing Group, 29 E. 21st Street, New York, NY 10010

Editor, manager of special sales, director of special sales and rights for The Millbrook Press, Inc., Brookfield, CT January 1992 through March 1998

Fiction reader and manuscript evaluator, Redbook Magazine, New York, NY 1990-1994

AFFILIATIONS

Poets & Writers, Inc.
Literacy Volunteers
The Authors Guild
PEN

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College

IN HER OWN WORDS

How much of your work is based on your own experience?

Sometimes writers don't want to showcase details about their own lives, but enjoy the freedom of leaving themselves behind to explore places they've never been. Boondocking was that kind of novel for me. So was Shelterbelt. But even when I use actual experience in my work, I distort it, bend it, sometimes almost completely so that it is subjugated to the character, not the other way around. Still, my readers want to believe that the story has at least some basis in fact. It's a way of demystifying the creative process, and in the worst-case scenario leads to a strange kind of censorship that tells us men can't write convincing women characters, etc. In my case the imagination is almost always more instructive (and reliable!) than memory.

Why isn't there more information about the actual accident which fuels Sylvia and Clayton's change of lifestyle in Boondocking and about the mysterious death of Benjamin in Shelterbelt?

Accidents themselves don't interest me. The aftereffects of tragedies, however, do. How ordinary people accommodate losses, how they change and stretch beyond what they thought themselves capable of is fascinating. And technically, in the case of Boondocking, because the accident is relayed through Sylvia's point of view, she has no first-hand information about the event, even if she could bring herself to revisit the scene.

Why aren't your books longer?

I suppose because I started my writing life in poetry, I've always valued economy. The resonance of white space. What's selected to be left unsaid is nearly as important as what's on the page. Also...the minutiae of daily life presented blow by blow can get stultifying. I'm constantly concerned about boring the reader.