Life
Sharfeddin was born Heather Mason in remote Rosebud County, Montana to a forester father and an artist mother. In 1968, the Mason family moved to Riggins, Idaho on the Salmon River and later to nearby Lucile, where they lived in the remodeled Cow Creek pioneer schoolhouse. In those early years Sharfeddin and her two sisters enjoyed the remote Idaho back-country, collecting Indian artifacts and roughing it with local ranch kids. Sharfeddin remembers visiting such legendary places on the Salmon River as the Shepp Ranch and the Polly Bemis home, which were inaccessible by automobile.
In 1977, Lynn Mason moved the family to East Lansing, Michigan where he obtained his master's degree in forestry at Michigan State University. They were happy to return west to Missoula, Montana in 1979. Sharfeddin attended Hellgate Junior High and Big Sky High School, graduating in 1984. She moved to Portland, Oregon in 1986.
Heather Sharfeddin holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in Bath, England.
Works
Her first novel Blackbelly, published in 2005 by Bridge Works Publishing, is set in central Idaho where she grew up. She draws her imagery and characters from those early years and the folklore of the Salmon River.
In 2006, her second novel Mineral Spirits was published, also by Bridge Works Publishing, and is set in remote Mineral County, Montana. Sharfeddin has called her work "contemporary western", which she defines as stories about the rural west that take place during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She promotes this genre through talks and seminars.
In 2009, her third novel Windless Summer was published by Random House (Delta imprint), and is set in the Columbia River Gorge in the fictional town of Rocket, Washington.
In 2010, Blackbelly was released in paperback under the title Sweetwater Burning by Random House (Bantam imprint).
In 2011, Sharfeddin's fourth novel Damaged Goods was published by Random House and is set in rural western Oregon. It follows the relationship of a brain-damaged auctioneer and a child sex-abuse survivor.
In September 2016 Sharfeddin's fifth novel "What Keeps You" will be released by Martin Brown Publishing.
Sharfeddin is contributor at Dirt & Seeds, a literary website, where she serialized an experimental novel, Between.
She regularly writes book reviews for Colorado Review, Center for Literary Publishing.
The Blue Mountains are a mountain range in the northwestern United States, located largely in northeastern Oregon and stretching into extreme southeastern Washington. The range has an area of about 15,000 square miles (39,000 km2), stretching east and southeast of Pendleton, Oregon, to the Snake River along the Oregon–Idaho border.
The Salmon River, also known as the "River of No Return", is a river located in the U.S. state of Idaho in the western United States. It flows for 425 miles (685 km) through central Idaho, draining a rugged, thinly populated watershed of 14,000 square miles (36,000 km2). The river drops more than 7,000 feet (2,100 m) from its headwaters, near Galena Summit above the Sawtooth Valley in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, to its confluence with the Snake River. Measured at White Bird, its average discharge is 11,060 cubic feet per second. The Salmon River is the longest undammed river in the contiguous United States.
The Clark Fork, or the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, is a river in the U.S. states of Montana and Idaho, approximately 310 miles (500 km) long. It is named after William Clark of the 1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition. The largest river by volume in Montana, it drains an extensive region of the Rocky Mountains in western Montana and northern Idaho in the watershed of the Columbia River. The river flows northwest through a long valley at the base of the Cabinet Mountains and empties into Lake Pend Oreille in the Idaho Panhandle. The Pend Oreille River in Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia, Canada which drains the lake to the Columbia in Washington, is sometimes included as part of the Clark Fork, giving it a total length of 479 miles (771 km), with a drainage area of 25,820 square miles (66,900 km2). In its upper 20 miles (32 km) in Montana near Butte, it is known as Silver Bow Creek. Interstate 90 follows much of the upper course of the river from Butte to Saint Regis. The highest point within the river's watershed is Mount Evans at 10,641 feet (3,243 m) in Deer Lodge County, Montana along the Continental Divide.
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Vardis Alvero Fisher was an American writer from Idaho who wrote popular historical novels of the Old West. After studying at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago, Fisher taught English at the University of Utah and then at the Washington Square College of New York University until 1931. He worked with the Federal Writers' Project to write the Works Project Administration The Idaho Guide, which was published in 1937. In 1939, Fisher wrote Children of God, a historical novel concerning the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The novel won the Harper Prize. In 1940, Fisher relocated to Hagerman, Idaho, and spent the next twenty years writing the 12-volume Testament of Man (1943–1960) series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cavemen to civilization. Fisher's novel Mountain Man (1965) was adapted in the film Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
The Gilmore and Pittsburgh Railroad (G&P), now defunct, was an American railroad located in southwestern Montana and east-central Idaho. Constructed in 1909 and 1910 between Armstead, Montana, and Salmon, Idaho, the G&P served mining and agricultural areas in Lemhi County, Idaho, and Beaverhead County, Montana. The line was financially backed by the Northern Pacific Railway (NP) and later became its subsidiary. Never financially successful, the G&P ceased operations in 1939, and the railroad was dismantled the following year.
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Grace Edgington Jordan was an American writer and journalist who wrote primarily about her adopted home state of Idaho. She was the wife of former Idaho governor and United States Senator Leonard B. Jordan.
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Thomas Savage was an American author of novels published between 1944 and 1988. He is best known for his Western novels, which drew on early experiences in the American West.
Polly Bemis House was the home of pioneers to Idaho County, Idaho, USA, Charles Bemis and his wife Polly Bemis, who lived alongside the Salmon River in the late 19th and early 20th century. Polly was a Chinese American former teenage slave whose story became a biographical novel and was fictionalized in the 1991 film A Thousand Pieces of Gold.
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