Miranda Schmidt‘s debut novel Leafskin is about motherhood, queer love, and the environment. She is a PhD candidate at Bath Spa University and received their MFA from the University of Washington, and has published work in places like Electric Literature, Orion, Catapult, and elsewhere. She has received support from Lambda Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers and Bread Loaf Environmental Conference.
We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers can discover the books that shaped her life.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. I just loved the world and Ramona as a character and all the trouble she got into. There was something about the place of the books that really enchanted me when I was a kid. I didn’t realize that the books were set in Portland until well after I moved here, but I think it makes a kind of sense to my child self that I ended up in Ramona’s city. I’m reading them to my own kid now and finding it really fascinating to see how Cleary inhabits this young child’s perspective in a way that makes so much sense to kids and is very relatable for grownups as well. Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea series was also huge for me and is one I continue to go back to. I remember reading The Tombs of Atuan in fourth grade when I was home with the chicken pox and having just the most surreal reading experience and thinking it was the strangest fever dream of book. I loved it.
What book helped you through puberty?
Orlando by Virginia Woolf and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. These are both such queer books but they’re also classics so in my conservative midwestern hometown it wasn’t necessarily frowned upon to read them. All the adults just saw this shy smart teen reading big old books while I was inside them experiencing the fluidities of gender and sexuality across time. They were my first conscious experiences of queer literature and they just really helped me to start figuring out my young queer self. The books are also both aesthetically gorgeous and clever and strange. I still love them.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I don’t think I could assign all teenagers the same book. I can speak to books I wish someone had handed me as a teenager, though. One that I’m so sad I didn’t find back then is Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch. I love that book and my teenage self would have been so enchanted by it. I was always looking for books that were magical and folkloric in a way that really embraced the weirdness of fairy tales. I also would have loved to have had Malinda Lo’s Ash and Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay, but they hadn’t been written yet.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
This is such a hard question! I’m going to focus on a syllabus that looks more specifically at novel writing, because otherwise I would list far too many books. I’d start with some modernists and probably choose Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf because the first chapter is such an encapsulation of the book and the work really pushes the boundaries of the novel form when it comes to perspective. And Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin because it is such a gorgeous book that holds such a complex relationship with its own narrator. I’d want to read Jazz by Toni Morrison because of the way the style and form and story all work together. I’d read Antelope Woman by Louise Erdrich because of the way she moves through perspectives and stories and I think I’d want to read the prior version, Antelope Woman, as well and discuss revision and how we rethink our work over time. I’d look at Edinburgh by Alexander Chee and I’d probably pair that with a talk he gave about writing traumatic experiences. The book is incredible and the way he talks about his experience writing the book can be really helpful for writers. I’d look at Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi because it’s a book that holds its own center through multiple internal perspectives and stories. And In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado for the genre play and the way personal narrative is contextualized within larger social structures. Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches because of how it considers storytelling and the forms that shape us. And Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for a novel that thinks like a poem. I could keep going but I’m going to stop myself here because this class would already probably last a whole year.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
So many! I wrote this novel as part of my PhD so I had a whole formalized reading list. I read books that embraced the spaces between poetry and prose like How to Be Human by Paula Cocozza. I read selkie books like Orkney by Amy Sackville. I read books about ecological devastation like Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith. I read books that considered nonhuman perspective like Wild Iris by Louise Glück. I read books about parent artists like Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. And I read craft books that considered alternative narrative structures like Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Allison. And a lot of the books that made my Damn Good Writing syllabus came with me on the journey too.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’m reading two recent small press releases: Passage by Ellene Glenn Moore from Orison Books, a really fascinating lyric essay chapbook about time. Sir, a collaborative chapbook by Emme Lunde and Autumn Bettinger from Picture Frame Press, which is hilarious and beautiful and devastating. I’ve been moving very slowly through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry since the beginning of the year, trying to give each sentence and idea my full attention. Whenever I pick up this book, I feel my connection to the more-than-human and to other humans, to the ecosystems we are all a part of. I feel something inside me move a little closer into balance with all these beings who share the world. And two novels that I’m just diving into and absolutely adoring right now are Karen Russell’s The Antidote (just wow!) and my dear friend Audie Shushan’s manuscript of her first novel. Audie is an incredible, deeply imaginative writer who I’m sure you’ll be speaking to about her debut in the not too distant future.