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Deirdre mcnamer biography

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Deirdre McNamer author biography, plus links to books by Deirdre McNamer.

Deirdre McNamer

Deirdre McNamer is the author of the acclaimed novels Rima in the Weeds, One Sweet Quarrel, and My Russian. She has won praise for the intelligence, beauty, precision, and sweep of her fiction. Red Rover is her first novel in seven years.

McNamer teaches in the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the University of Montana, Missoula, and chaired the fiction panel that judged the 2011 National Book Awards

This biography was last updated on 08/02/2007.

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    Deirdre McNamer

    American novelist

    Deirdre McNamer is an Americannovelist. McNamer is on the fiction faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars' MFA program, and previously taught in the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the University of Montana, Missoula,.[1] She chaired the fiction panel that judged the 2011 National Book Awards, and in 2015 received an Artists Innovation Award from the Montana Arts Council.

    Published works

    McNamer has written several novels, including

    • Rima in the Weeds (1991)
    • One Sweet Quarrel (1994)
    • My Russian (1999)
    • Red Rover (2007)
    • Aviary (2021)

    Critic Sven Birkerts: "Red Rover" is suggestively compressed in its way of paying out revelations, which steadily gather mass and shadows. Indeed, the means of presentation, the structural logic of the novel, are as much a part of its meaning as its thematic suggestions. McNamer's way of combining her far-flung episodes effectively triangulates the unknowable event at the heart of the novel; we work out much of the drama through a kind of echolocation." The Washingto

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    CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: Deirdre McNamer

    Catalina Baker: Dee, thank you so much for speaking with me. 

    Deirdre McNamer: Of course.


    CB: So, when I was brainstorming what I wanted to ask you, I immediately thought about character. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually means to “develop a character,” and recently, you used a word to describe a character’s motivations that really resonated. You called them a character’s “agenda.” And what I found interesting about that word was the fact that an “agenda” suggests both long-term, game-changing actions and short-term, everyday tasks. I was wondering: when you sit down to write a story, how do you think about the characters’ agendas?

    DM: That’s interesting. I think I start with an image or a place, but I combine it with a situation. And those lead to an agenda. For example, an image I’ve been working with recently is a woman who has returned to the little town where she grew up and decides to, essentially, occupy her empty childhood house. And she can do it because it’s been on the market forever and nobody’s

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