Awards

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Women Writing the West WILLA Award; Mid-List Press First Series Award; Wyoming Arts Council Best Short Story & Blanchan Awards; Ucross, Jentel, Mesa Refuge Fellow; Colorado Authors’ League Book Award. Finalist: Bakeless, Glasgow, Reading the West, High Plains Book Award.

 

Graduate

Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Iowa Nonfiction Program

 

Bio

Julene Bair is the author of The Ogallala Road, A Story of Love, Family, and the Fight to Keep the Great Plains from Running Dry (Viking Penguin 2014). Her first book, One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award and a WILLA Award from Women Writing the West. Bair’s essays have appeared in venues ranging from the New York Times to High Country News. A 2004 NEA fellow, she has taught at the University of Wyoming, the University of Iowa, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Denver’s Lighthouse Writers and the Jackson Hole Writing Festival. Prior to teaching and writing, her career interests ranged from the management of a San Francisco recording studio to filmmaker to farmer. She lives in Santa Rosa, California.

My Personal Writing Journey

I got bitten by the writing bug as a child, when I wrote my first poems about the beauty and spirit of my favorite horse, Flame. She was too wild to ride in reality, but in my imagination I raced across the prairie on her bare back. At eighteen, I left Kansas for  what I thought would be a more exciting life on the West Coast. But the most exciting thing I did in San Francisco was leave it some years later to live in a remote mountain cabin in the Mojave Desert. Thinking I would become this modern-day Thoreau, I tapped out stories on an old manual typewriter and sent them off to The New Yorker and other noteworthy magazines. Before long, I’d papered my outhouse walls in rejections slips.

Eventually I published a few pieces in small journals and, with the help of the editors, my writing got good enough to win me acceptance at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While there, I expected to write stories about my experiences in 1960s San Francisco and my adventures in the wilds of the Mojave, but my fingers kept tapping out stories about my original home and about my brief return to Kansas in my mid-thirties as a single, soon-to-be mother seeking the safety of home. I have been coming back to Kansas in my writing ever since. Why? I think because my relationship to that place has always been under threat. I didn’t realize this consciously until my father died and the up-till-then unmentionable possibility of selling the farm first entered my head. I wrote The Ogallala Road to hang onto my identity, to own my Kansas home, if not in fact, at least in words.