Australian-American Writer, Editor, Volunteer Prison Teacher.
Gillian Haines
About Gillian
“Migration leaves a place in the heart that itches. My fingers always seek the little welt to worry it.”
Gillian Haines is a writer, editor, and prison volunteer. When she was nine, her family boxed their settee and their spatulas and sailed south of the equator. She was reborn to a sunburned land where Australians are only patriotic about beach-towels. She never thought she would leave, but met an American, thirty-thousand feet above the ground, where the normal rules of interaction do not apply. The day after they bought a 1930’s Spanish Revival house in Tucson, her young, scientist husband was felled to the carpet by a catastrophic stroke. Isolated and without friends in a desert city, she volunteered to visit four men in maximum-security prison.
Gillian and the prisoners were on identical journeys. Their lives had shrunk. They were struggling to regain themselves, to deepen and grow lives that they no longer recognized.
She stayed with those men for ten years, until they were released or transferred to lower security prisons. Convinced that four felons had given her more than she ever gave them, she then began to teach creative writing in two prison yards. Today, together with award-winning writers Richard Shelton and Ken Lamberton, she is an editor for the Rain Shadow Review, which presents the creative talents of those who are currently, or have been previously incarcerated in Arizona state prisons.
“Gillian Haines’ writing is a deep plunge into a warm, briny sea—you’ll sink into her words and get carried away. Her graceful and measured prose will enchant you, and in the end transform you.”
Ken Lamberton, John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, two-time winner Southwest Book of the Year
Her memoir writing appears in magazines and literary journals like The Tishman Review, Cherry Tree, Edible Baja, Bridge Eight, Santa Clara Review, The Illanot Review, Soltice, Flying South, and BioStories. Editors selected her stories for inclusion in two anthologies: Encounters and Stories from the Other Side, a Pearson college textbook. Her Fragile Landscapes was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Gillian has found friends in a supportive writing community and has put down roots in a land where saguaros bloom beside dry riverbeds. In a parched land where hummingbirds thrum and where her heart recognizes more than the desert’s thirst.
Read More From Gillian.
