Valerie Miner

Creative Writing and Literary Arts

Nonfiction

 vminer@stanford.edu

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books. Her latest novel is After Eden. Other novels include Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award. Abundant Light was a 2005 Fiction Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.

After Eden, 2007

After Eden is a provocative novel that examines the meaning of home and homelessness among people who see such issues as more than abstractions. In a story populated by Pomo Indians, Euro-American ranchers and vintners, and Mexican American migrant laborers, Valerie Miner deftly juxtaposes differing cultural views of wilderness, trespassing, and home.

Winter's Edge, 2006

Winter's Edge depicts the vibrant community that centers around one block in San Francisco's downtown Tenderloin district in the late 1970s, home to people from all walks of life. Here, prostitutes, tourists, immigrants, senior citizens, shopowners, and the homeless coexist, living among the modest shops, cafes, and inexpensive, run-down apartment building's near the city's heart. And here, Chrissie MacInnes and Margaret Sawyer share an intense, long-time friendship and a deep love of their community.

Abundant Light, 2004

Abundant Light, Valerie Miner's fourth collection of short fiction, reveals a master storyteller writing in her prime. This collection looks closely at definitions of family and asks how this fragile and frightening entity can shape us, nurture us, or even destroy us.

The Low Road, 2001

"This is the story I have been writing for my whole life. With my life," writes Valerie Miner in this elegant and compassionate account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. The Low Road explores location and dislocation in a large, poverty stricken Scottish family.

A Walking Fire, 1994

Madness, alcoholism, suicide, aging, parental betrayal, politics and Vietnam are all part of Miner's ( All Good Women ) ambitious but flawed story of one young woman's exile and return. In 1968, with her two brothers serving in Vietnam, Cora Casey made a radical departure from her family's conservative, working-class patriotism and became embroiled in an arson that resulted in the death of her co-conspirator.

Trespassing & Other Stories, 1989

Here is a collection of short stories that spans the globe but also finds time to examine the quiet shifts in an individual’s sense of self. In Trespassing and Other Stories, Valerie Miner touches on the lives and histories of many people in different parts of the world, yet links them with her careful perceptions and empathies.

Blood Sisters, 1982

At the heart of Blood Sisters are two cousins, one Irish, one American, who grew up steeped in their mothers’ ideals of the 1916 Uprising. The two young women try to understand each other’s views, to cross the blurry lines between private and political life, but are divided by their separate histories and often despair at the possibility of comprehension, let alone reconciliation.