Heidi Arneson’s stories have been called “Visionary-both haunting and hilarious,” and “unexpected and glorious.” She trail-blazed solo performance with her series of one-woman shows, created spoken word with male inmates, and plumbed small-town secrecy with her gripping first novel, Interlocking Monsters.
She is a recipient of the Bush Artist Fellowship, Loft / Jerome Minnesota Writer’s Grant, and Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, and her autobiographical workshops have fostered many solo performers.
Her plays include Itchy Tingles, BloodyMerryJammyParty, and DeGrade School. Her painting easel is three feet from her writing desk, and her newest book, The Chalk Canoe (fiction, Invisible Ink, illustrated by Alberta Mirais) releases May 2, 2019.
Heidi Arneson is a writer with a sure eye for details, a deep empathy for the young, and an unstinting resolve to peer into the darkness within human hearts.
– Journalist Jay Gabler
Heidi’s Newest Work Included in HOME: AN ANTHOLOGY
Minnesota-connected short stories, memoir,
and poetry about the meaning of “Home.”
Coming October 1, 2019 >
NEWEST WORK:
THE CHALK CANOE
A Magic Garden of Uncanniness
In the lakeside town of White Rock fish heads are nailed to the trees, a killer lurks under the muck, and the bare lips of one girl must never touch the bare lips of another. But Cat McCloud falls dangerously in love with the new girl and is sucked into a maelstrom of witchcraft, time-travel, and adolescent passion. Heidi Arneson’s darkly comic follow-up to Interlocking Monsters propels Cat into the enchanted underbelly of suburbia, where death waits round every corner.
“Heidi Arneson’s words fill the pages of The Chalk Canoe like
fireworks light a Fourth of July sky. Color me bedazzled.”
– Noel Holston, Like the Dew
INTERLOCKING MONSTERS
Gripping – Holds You Like a Vise
Nested in a big, well-meaning Midwestern family, young Cat McCloud fears there might be a perpetrator in her midst—related to the cold cases of five missing boys. Relentlessly probing into the past with her preternatural knowledge, and sneaking away from suburbia to rural Iowa in a Dodge Dart Swinger, Cat risks her life while on the road as
she pieces together a generational puzzle of secrecy long-hidden by The Rule of Silence.
[Arneson] masterfully captures the voices of children who face the world’s ugliness and beauty without quite having the words to name or understand either. Her insight into the intricacies and compulsions of family, childhood, secrets, mystery and terror kept me spellbound, turning pages into the night.
– author Patricia Drury Sidman