About Elizabeth Hand

Elizabeth Hand is the author of twenty genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and have been chosen as Notable Books by the New York Times and Washington Post. Her critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” [Katherine Dunn] is being developed as a UK streaming series, and several of her other works have been optioned for film and TV. She is a longtime reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, and has written for numerous publications, including the L.A. Times, Salon, the Boston Review, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Much of her work focuses on artists and performers, particularly those outside the mainstream, as well as on the impacts of climate change. She is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, and for over thirty years has led myriad writing workshops, including Clarion West, Clarion, Odyssey, the Yale Writer's Conference, Pike’s Peak Writer's Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and recently, the debut Salam Writer's Workshop in Lahore, Pakistan and a futurist workshop at Wytham Abbey, Oxford, UK. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London. You can find her on Twitter @liz_hand and on Facebook @ElizabethHandAuthor.

Tooley Cottage

In 1990, a few weeks before my daughter was born, I bought a ramshackle, tiny (300 square feet) camp on a lake in Maine, with no running water or indoor plumbing. We lived there full-time (her brother came along two years later) for eight years. Improvements were made very slowly, as I could afford them — in early days, I'd go out in the middle of the night in winter with a baseball bat and bang on the side of the cottage to scare away the porcupine that was gnawing at the floorboards. Tooley Cottage is now 400 square feet, with water pumped up from the lake and a composting toilet. It's where I’ve written all my books (save my first novel, Winterlong) and continues to be my writing studio. It’s on a wetland that functions as a sort of wildlife preserve — over the years I’ve seen bobcats, coyotes, foxes, deer, moose, otters, beavers, mink, weasels, fishers, and myriad birds — bald eagles, bitterns, great blue herons, wood ducks, and all kinds of migrating waterfowl. And once, most memorably, a wolf (which I hate to report was killed in Ellsworth a few weeks later). I wish I had Before pictures, to show how far it’s come (a very very VERY long way), but this is what it looks like now. —Liz