Strand, Ginger

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Strand, Ginger

(Ginger Gail Strand)

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Princeton University, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Author, freelance communications consultant, and copywriter. Part-time instructor at New York University, New York, NY, and Fordham University, New York, NY. Has also worked as a roadhouse waitress, advertising agency secretary, copywriter for a consultant firm, test-question writer, film critic, studio assistant for an artist, medical transcriber, theatre box-office manager, and restaurant hostess.

AWARDS, HONORS: Awarded fiction residencies at Yaddo and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Sewanee Writers' Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship; MacDowell Colony fellowship.

WRITINGS:

Flight (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2005.

Author of short stories. Contributor to numerous magazines, including Swink Online, Poets & Writers, Believer, Iowa Review, Carolina Quarterly, Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Mississippi Review, Harper's, and New England Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Although trained as an academic, Ginger Strand found her calling writing fiction. She wrote and published numerous short stories before producing her first novel, Flight. The novel is greatly influenced by Strand's own father, who was employed as a pilot for TransWorld Airlines. In the book, the protagonist, Will Gruen, is a commercial airline pilot who also works on his family farm in Michigan. Will struggles with his career as he nears a forced, agerelated retirement, while his wife, Carol, is unhappy and looking for her own career path. Meanwhile, the couple's two daughters deal with their own life issues: Margaret's marriage is falling apart, while Leanne is about to be married.

A critic writing in Publishers Weekly noted that "Strand writes convincingly, if not scintillatingly, of the Gruen family as they face down their demons and reach out for their dreams in this solid debut." Other critics were also enthusiastic. Library Journal contributor Patrick Sullivan calling Flight "impressive" and stating: "This powerfully engaging novel is enthusiastically recommended."

Strand told CA: "I've always wanted to be a writer, because I've always enjoyed reading more than anything else in life. I love everything from Virgil to Virginia Woolf to Vogue magazine. Sometimes I have to stop reading, because I tend to hear the voices of other authors in my head when I'm writing. A little bit of that is okay, but not too much. In an ideal world my own writing would be like a hallway, taking you in its own direction, but with everything I've ever read echoing down it."