Heidi Schmidt was born on Staten Island, New York, to very young parents who dreamed of raising five children on a farm. Soon she had four younger siblings, and they moved out of the city to a crumbling stone house down a long dirt road, where they raised sheep and chickens and became ever more "eccentric"- bankrupt that is, and peculiar. She began writing fiction when she was very young, trying to make some sense of it all.Her first stories were published in The Atlantic while she was at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and when she graduated from Iowa she was offered a year's fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.She fell in love with the little town way out at sea, and she's lived here for 25 years now, with my husband Roger Skillings and our daughter Marisa.