Elissa Minor
Writer. Editor. Teacher.
Elissa Minor lives on the north Oregon coast. She teaches college writing and literature, and publishes fiction and nonfiction in national literary magazines and anthologies. Her memoir, Another Eve: Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast explores the intersection of queer theory, nature, and the deconstruction of purity culture/high control religion. Her short story collection, The Prisoner Pear: Stories From the Lake, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick.
She is currently working on a speculative work of creative nonfiction that braids mental illness, the death of her father, and her beloved American West. When she isn't writing, Elissa can be found with her wife, kids, and two dogs bundled up on a rainy Oregon beach.
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From Another Eve:
The instruction came from the tide. When the ocean water started spilling into the bay, it brought with it a shoal of small silvery fish, and one after another the pelicans took wing and hovered above the swirling water; they dove and twisted and disappeared head first below the surface, only to bob back up, their long beaks pointed skyward. In one quick motion, they expelled the excess water from their throat pouches and swallowed the fish whole before returning to the sky to repeat the process. It was a veritable feeding frenzy. I wondered how the pelicans knew to come to this exact bay at this exact time in this exact month. What pull inside them knew the tides?
I’d felt it, too. That pull. Like an internal clock telling me to get up and move, to follow the tide, to find the thing that will sustain me. To leave a religion, to leave a heterosexual marriage. It brought me here, to this coastal town, to the bed where I found Katie waiting, night after night.
