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Nevada Barr: No clunker yet!

Excerpts from the interview by Lynn Kaczmarek in the February/March 2002 issue of Mystery News

 

When I called, Nevada Barr’s husband said she was cutting out paper dolls. A vision appeared of the sassy-looking author of the Anna Pigeon series with blunt-nosed scissors in hand, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by paper scraps. Actor, park ranger, writer, collage artist Nevada Barr has had an interesting life.

She started as an actor. “…for years and years and years and I was making a pretty good living in Minneapolis doing the industrial training films and that kind of thing.” Those of you lucky enough to have been in attendance at the Boulder Left Coast Crime in 1996 when Barr was Toastmaster were treated to some clips of those memorable films. “I enjoyed it, but it had gotten to where it was the same thing over and over and I started getting interested in the environmental movement…”

And became a National Park Ranger. “The Park Service was kind of romantic and dramatic and I always loved the parks. I could do it in the summer for lousy pay and continue working as an actor in the winter to make a living. So it was a nice fiscal set-up. And then, I looked really cute in the uniform…”

And then a writer. “…my second summer I was wandering around the back country in West Texas and there were a couple of people there that needed to be dead. And I was fantasizing about ways that I could kill them and get away with it and kind of the whole story of the Anna Pigeon character came alive.”

Although Nevada Barr basically writes for entertainment, she’s “always studying something.” In Hunting Season, Nevada Barr is contemplating Anna Pigeon “…her coming into actually being a manager and becoming comfortable with that…She started working with Barth in Deep South, finding a way of turning someone towards her. Because a lot of her energy was in avoidance until she went into management. If she didn’t like somebody, she just, you know, cut them out of her life.”

In a few weeks, Nevada Barr will move her writing (and her art) into her new office. “…It’ll have two huge windows and it will have all of my art supplies up in one corner and a fainting couch down underneath the windows. French doors opening out onto…we have a long porch, a long southern porch. So, French doors opening onto the porch and I expect to be very, very brilliant in there.” Me too – I’m sure there won’t be a clunker in the bunch.

Read the complete interview in the February/March 2002 issue of Mystery News

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