Haynie, Barbara 1947-

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HAYNIE, Barbara 1947-

PERSONAL:

Born November 22, 1947, in Santa Ana, CA; daughter of Jackson (a businessman and inventor) and Jackie (a homemaker) Brooks; married Tom Haynie (a nurseryman), September 10, 1966. Ethnicity: "Swedish/Welsh/French/English/etc." Education: Received B.F.A. Politics: "Liberal." Hobbies and other interests: Horses, biking, gardening, travel, hiking, fly-fishing.

ADDRESSES:

Home—1224 N. Shields, Fort Collins, CO 80524. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Five Star, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, ME 04901. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, landscape designer, businesswoman, and artist.

WRITINGS:

The Terrain of Paradise, Five Star (Waterville, ME), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A novel, tentatively titled Virga.

SIDELIGHTS:

In The Terrain of Paradise, novelist Barbara Haynie tells the story of Maggie Everhardt, who leaves her husband, Hale, a buffalo rancher, and takes their daughter, Jilly, from the ranch in Wyoming to Palo Alto, California. When Jilly is grown, Maggie feels the need to resolve old issues that she ran away from, so she moves back to Wyoming and secretly buys the ranch next to Hale's. She is tormented by a guilty secret—the reason she left Hale in the first place—and she wants to confess to him and earn redemption. However, first she has to gain the courage to do so. As she does, she remodels the cabin she has bought and reclaims the land. A Booklist reviewer praised the novel as "thoughtful."

Haynie decided to write the book after her husband, Tom, hinted that she was not helping enough in their garden center business. "I figured the only way I'm going to make big money is to write a book," Haynie told Kelli Lackett in the Coloradoan. She wrote the first draft of the book in forty days, then took a year to revise it. It took her another year to find a publisher.

Haynie chose Wyoming as a setting because she loves wide open spaces and small towns. She decided to make the woman the wrongdoer in the relationship because in all the other novels she had read, it was the man who wronged the woman. "I decided to do a switch on that," she told Lackett. "I've been married for thirty-six years. If there is one thing I know about, it's marriage."