Jane Smiley’s name says it all. She is smiley, as well as smart, sassy, saucy, and serious. She won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres but has won and deserved many other awards for her numerous novels, non-fiction books, and even young-adult books. Jane is a fascinating woman. She loves horses, animals, and people and observes them in ways only she can do. She informs me provocatively that Missouri is not just a sleepy state, that it can be wildly explosive, that she grew up in a family that loved gossip, that the dark Nordic philosophy that there is no hope and it just goes down hill from there can sometimes make for interesting characters, and that the quirky scientist in Private Life was actually based on a distant relative from her past. Join Jane and me for some lively exchanges and peek into the wonderfully imaginative and complex mind of a gifted American writer.
