Haven Kimmel
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Haven Kimmel (born 1965) is an American author, novelist, and poet.
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[edit] Biography
Haven Kimmel was born in New Castle, Indiana, and was raised in Mooreland, Indiana, the focus of her bestselling memoir, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing up Small in Mooreland, Indiana (2001).
Kimmel earned her undergraduate degree in English and creative writing from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana and a graduate degree from North Carolina State University, where she studied with novelist Lee Smith. She also attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Haven Kimmel was a poet prior to writing a memoir of her early childhood. The Solace of Leaving Early (2002) and Something Rising (Light and Swift) (2004) are the first two novels in Kimmel's "trilogy of place" about fictional Hopwood County, Indiana. The third book, released in September 2007, is titled The Used World. Her other works include a second memoir, She Got Up Off the Couch (2005), a poetic children's book, Orville: A Dog Story (2003), and a retelling of the Book of Revelation in Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (2004), edited by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet (ISBN 0-7432-3276-3).
[edit] Works
- 2001 A Girl Named Zippy: Growing up Small in Mooreland, Indiana, memoir (ISBN 0-385-49982-5)
- 2002 The Solace of Leaving Early, novel (ISBN 0-385-49983-3)
- 2003 Orville: A Dog Story, children’s book (ISBN 0-618-15955-X)
- 2004 Something Rising (Light and Swift), novel (ISBN 0-7432-4775-2)
- 2005 She Got Up Off the Couch, and Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana, memoir (ISBN 0-7432-8499-2)
- 2007 The Used World, novel (ISBN 0-7432-4778-7)
- 2008 Kaline Klattermaster's Tree House , children’s book (ISBN 978-0-689-87402-4)
[edit] Quotes
- The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it. (From A Girl Named Zippy, p. 2.)
- Possibility, infinity, beauty -- none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin? (From The Solace of Leaving Early, p. 40.)
- Orville barked and barked against his chain. And right in the middle of a long summer day, when he had barked about how he was really a good dog in a bad mood, and how he missed that one-eyed doll, and how there was something so terrible about the feeling of a chain against a neck, everything changed, because a girl with cotton-candy hair moved into the little house across the road and Orville fell in love. (From Orville: A Dog Story, p. 18.)
- "It's marriage, family, home, sentimentality, continuity, these are the lies that eat women like a machine." [...] "A Woman-Chipper, can you imagine how that would sell? Everyone, anywhere on the political spectrum, would want one." (From Something Rising (Light and Swift), p. 126.)
- "She had done all these things and she was going to graduate summa cum laude, which meant Good But Loud, from the Honors College, and she had done it all in twenty-three months. It takes some people more time to hang a curtain." She Got Up Off the Couch, p. 189.)
