Biography

If a person can be imprinted with a landscape, then Lise Saffran’s internal geography includes the rocky shores of the West Coast. She grew up in Marin County, California, in the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais and attended college in Eugene, Oregon. After close to twenty years in the Midwest, she still gets off the plane in San Francisco, or Portland, or Seattle and some part of her thinks, I’m home.

It’s not surprising then, that Lise Saffran’s first novel Juno's Daughters is set in the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington State. A camping trip to the San Juan Islands is the first journey she and her husband took together when they were college students in Eugene, Oregon and it is the place they returned to years later, for a special birthday weekend without the kids. It was on that trip that they saw local theater company Island Stage Left perform their version of The Tempest, and it was that experience that provided the kernel of inspiration for the imagined story of Jenny Alexander and her daughters.

Lise didn’t start writing seriously until she was about thirty and in the middle of a career in public health that included a stint preventing farm injuries with university extension. She earned her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in May of the year she was thirty-three and had her first child one month later. She has two children now and a very nice life in a Midwestern town but most of her writing still features settings within a stone’s throw of the Pacific Ocean. When she published a story in the Family Wanted anthology called “Men and Fish,” one of her friends pointed out that the title would work well for most of the things she had written!