You might know K.G. Schneider from her terrific blog, Free Range Librarian, her smart, original, entertaining, and informative take on library sciences, writing, technology—and more. Or you might have come across her writing in any one of these stand-out anthologies: Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Nonrequired Reading, Powder: Women Writing in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq. Or you may have seen her work in journals like Nerve and Gastronomica, or White Crane Review. She’s a superb essayist, keenly attuned to telling detail, able to craft language that surprises and sings, in love with tracking down the precise facts that ground the best nonfiction. She’s an air force veteran, a librarian, a world traveler, a technical and literary writer. Which is to say: she’s possessed of a wholly original point of view. Her essay in Nerve (reprinted in Powder) was, hands down, the single most controversial piece I ever taught in the MFA classroom. When she moved to Florida, and we began working on Cassoulet, she was one of the first people I turned to. She came back to us with “Still Life on the Half-Shell,” a piece about local food and dislocation, oysters and the Apalachicola Bay. The piece is funny and sad, and delicious and pure magic. It’s about finding your way in a new place, and finding your way in love, and how learning to eat can take a lifetime. That, and oyster chowder.
