Writer Liza Birnbaum is interested in connections—both between people and the natural environment. She’s written creatively since childhood and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
While film or television can tell a story, Birnbaum loves writing because of the way it can show a character’s interior journey. “I’m really drawn to novels and fiction in particular because it gives you a look inside people,” she says. “I’m interested in the difference between internal experience and what is happening on the outside for people.” The landscape and the non-human world can often shape us in unpredictable ways.
In May, Birnbaum is returning to Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture (PMRCAA)—she was also a resident in 2022—to work on a novel about two friends who set out on a bike trip from the Bay Area to New Mexico. one friend turns around 10 days into the bike ride in Needles, CA–then the narrator, Jo, continues on to, expanding the scope of the trip to do a big circle through the western US.
Questions of Care and Stewardship, the 2025 residency theme, have been on Birnbaum’s mind lately. Stewardship can be a beautiful thing but can also have a negative side when it creates a paternalistic attitude that orders people around without talking to stakeholders and doing deep listening to figure out what kinds of actions will be most helpful and least harmful.
Birnbaum’s characters are trying to figure out,“What do I have to give that would be meaningful?” Birnbaum rode part of the route her characters will travel on a long ride through the western United States a decade ago. She’s looking forward to her two weeks at PMRCAA and the inspiration that comes from writing while in the same type of open landscape her characters will be encountering.
“It’s a huge gift,” Birnbaum says, “to sit and look out the window at the mountains in the mornings and just write for several hours.” In her normal life as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities & Writing at Cornish College of the Arts, it’s hard to find the same kind of time for sustained attention to her craft.
Liza Birnbaum will lead a writing workshop at The Ranch on May 27 from 4-6:30 p.m. entitled, Self-Portraits and Landscapes: Bringing the Personal into Nature Writing. Register online. She will also participate in the Open Studio on May 29 from 4-6 p.m with fellow residents Krista Schoening and Kaitlin Santoro.
