Miranda Schmidt is the author of the novel Leafskin (Stillhouse Press 2025). Their writing circles folklore, ecology, and queer magic and has appeared in Triquarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and more. With an MFA from the University of Washington and PhD from Bath Spa University, they have taught creative writing at Portland Community College, University of Washington, the Loft, and the Portland Book Festival. Their newsletter and teaching project, Writing Toward Nature, explores methods for bringing the more-than-human more deeply into our writing craft. Miranda lives in Portland, Oregon.
Meet Portland author Miranda Schmidt, crafter of spellbinding fiction and poetry, and one of the newest writing teachers at Literary Arts. Their debut novel Leafskin was published earlier this year by Stillhouse Press and was described by Jane Borodale as “a fresh, intricately-written and dreamlike novel about love, creativity and the natural world.” We’re delighted that Miranda will be offering several classes at Literary Arts throughout the winter and spring seasons and that we get to introduce them to you today with this short interview.
Q&A WITH MIRANDA SCHMIDT
Can you tell us about some of the upcoming classes you plan to teach? What are they all about and what do you hope students will take away from them?
I’m so excited to be teaching two classes at Literary Arts this winter:
Your Novel’s First Pages is going to be a multi-week deep dive into exactly that – the first pages of your novel. This is the entryway to your book, the way readers first connect to your story, and what you typically send out to agents and publishers. It’s also a major preoccupation of mine. I love novel openings and spend months, even years, on my own. Once I get those first twenty-five pages or so, I know what the novel is and how I need to write it. In class, we’ll workshop what you already have; write generative exercises to help you draft, polish, and explore new possibilities; and study published novels for inspiration.
I’ll also be teaching a short workshop called Writing with the Seasons. This is the first in a quarterly series, so if it’s full, look for the next one in spring. Our winter workshop will be dedicated to generative writing and inspiration for this dark part of the year, when the rains are heavy and the clouds are persistent and the world is a little bit quieter. I’ve found that considering the seasons as I write helps me to ground my work in the world around me and lean into some of the particularities that each season brings and I hope to explore that as a group.
Which writers, thinkers, or artists have had the most influence on your life as a writer?
Oh so many! I consistently return to Virginia Woolf for her style that expresses a whole philosophy of life and consciousness. Toni Morrison’s entire body of work with its clarity of purpose and incredible beauty. Poets like Louise Glück, Joy Harjo, Anne Carson, CA Conrad, Ada Limón, and so many others who show me the possibilities of language. Ursula K. Le Guin has been influencing how I think and imagine since I was a child reading her Earthsea books. Patricia McKillip and Susan Cooper hugely shaped my imagination when I was young and showed me ways of writing with folklore that still influence me.
In your experience, what are some of the challenges and joys that are unique to writing fiction?
I write both fiction and poetry and I love to merge the two, like I did in my debut novel Leafskin, partially because it’s a way to help me manage some of the aspects that I find more challenging about fiction, which tends to come down to what I’ve been taught readers expect of it. I often struggle with linear narratives and “plot.” I’ve loved craft essays and books that address the problems of how we are typically taught about narrative and story shape in our western cannon and suggest alternatives: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, that wonderful deepening center in Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches. Leaning into what I find difficult or troublesome is how I turn some of the challenges of writing fiction into some of my most joyful experiences of it.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve received from another writer or teacher?
One of my writing teachers, while teaching our class how to teach creative writing, told us that he’d had a writing teacher tell him that becoming a better writer went along with becoming a better person and I’ve been thinking about it ever since – the ethical connection between writing and personhood, how writing is so much about attending to all these small-seeming details of being a being in the world alongside all these huge philosophical questions about that beingness. I continually find questions driving my work as a writer.
When it comes to your own writing practice, what are some sources of creative inspiration for you right now?
Plants. I’ve been working on a new novel that takes place near a wetland that’s being developed to expand a town. The novel is about many things – grief, family, inheritance, love – and, like much of my work, it’s very much about how we, as humans, are in relation to other species. In the story, marsh plants begin to encroach on the town in uncanny ways and so I’m delving into plant folklore and wondering what it means to try to bring the voices of plants into the work in some way. That very open question of how to bring the more-than-human into our human work has been a huge inspiration for me and is something I write about frequently.
QUESTION LIGHTNING ROUND
Current favorite novel?
Right now, I’m reading Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad and it is absolutely incredible.
Your teaching style in 5 words?
conversational, collaborative, connective, inspiration-generating, and knowledgeable (I am a huge book nerd and give out so many further resource lists!)
Favorite place to write?
Under a tree or at my desk surrounded by books I love. Both feel like writing in wonderful company.
If you’d like to register for or learn more about Miranda’s classes, click on the links below:
Writing with the Seasons: Winter (one session on January 10) – SOLD OUT
Your Novel’s First Pages (starts January 20)
More information about Writing with the Seasons: Spring, including how to register, will be posted online soon!
