Chelsea Biondolillo

About Me

I have been a lot of things: art school girl, Camel girl, assistant to the manager, slow triathlete, business analyst, project manager. Right now I am trying to be a good student and a writer.

When I am not writing or reading, I do yoga, knit or hike. I love plants and birds and rocks and things, so I spend as much time as possible looking at and for them.

Someday I want a garden with chickens and bees. I have dreams of a tire stack filled with potato roots, a cupboard full of jarred things I put up myself. Yet I'm a city girl at heart--I spend my days off in coffeeshops and bookstores and museums. I don't think these two visions are mutually exclusive.

My poetry has appeared in The Rio Review; my fiction in Austin Monthly.

Nonfiction is my true love and humor my defense mechanism. My humor and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Diagram, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Sea Stories, VenusZine, RogueRunning.com, The Rio Review, and Stitch 'n' Bitch 2: Stitch 'n' Bitch Nation, by Debbie Stoller.

Why do you write?

Facts are the stuff of magic. There are so many amazing things that are real and true that making things up seems petty.

I write to better understand the things I know to be true or possible. I write to make sense of the natural world around me and to sing its mysteries.

Any favorite authors? Books?

My all-time favorite books (so far and not in order): Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins; The Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman; Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey; The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen; The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges