It’s the birthday of short story writer Amy Hempel (b. 1951), known and lauded by critics and writers and creative writing students and blah-de-blah-de-blah everywhere for well-honed stories of the minimalist school (think Raymond Carver).

(Sorry. It’s Friday. Amy Hempel is actually great.)

Hempel was born in Chicago and grew up in Denver. She was one of three children and found she could best get her mother’s attention via a clever use of words, so that’s what she did. They moved to San Francisco when Hempel was 16, and three years later, her mother killed herself; her mother’s sister then killed herself the following year. In her twenties, Hempel was injured in two major car accidents,and she also lost her best friend to leukemia.

Then Hempel moved to New York City and eventually took a writing workshop from Gordon Lish, the great editor at Knopf, who many say was responsible for the great success of Raymond Carver and others but whose name might nonetheless make you feel oogy because of his reputation as an egotistical control freak. (That’s an observation, not a judgment.) (Also, he had a long affair with Hempel while married, so: oogy.) Anyway, Lish’s influence on Hempel was probably very important, although interestingly when asked about this in interviews she says things along the lines of, Yes but that was a long time ago. With Lish’s help, Hempel published her first collection of short stories, Reasons to Live (1985), and was an instant success. Her second collection, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, came out in 1990, and more collections followed; she writes not quickly but brilliantly, producing perfectly crafted and darkly funny stories about grief and fear and loss.

Hempel has taught everywhere from the University of Florida to Harvard, Princeton, and the MFA program at Bennington College, Vermont. She got a Guggenheim in 2000 and if you google her you will find many images of a beautiful, ageless woman with long thick silver hair and huge eyes (like this one here). Her next collection, Sing to It, comes out in March of 2019 and I for one am planning to buy it.

Have a splendid, silvery, non-oogy Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.