kirsten alene pierce, writer, barista, amateur felter, lets plain wrap get to know her better. this is the fifty-first installment of plain wrap’s interview series in which plain wrap interviews all its facebook friends. thank you, kirsten alene pierce.

1. Tell us about yourself?

1. I recently learned to felt. I hope that someday I will be a world-renowned felter. In the meantime I am the author of Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, the editor of Unicorn Knife Fight, and a dangerously talented barista.

2. Have you read any good books lately?

2. I’ve read some amazing books lately. I just finished Cripple Wolf by Jeff Burk, which is a short story collection. It’s fantastic, pulpy, dumb, and sweet. I also just read The Professor and the Madman, this nonfiction book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. It gave me hope that if I end up in a mental institution, it will not interfere with my career in English Scholarship.

3. Why did you leave your last job?

3. I had to quit this tiny bagel shop in Seattle because I moved to Portland. Before that, I had to leave this awesome TA position at a college because I moved to Seattle. I need to stop moving.

4. What have you done to improve your knowledge in the last year?

4. I married my husband. This made my knowledge triplicate. I read a lot, but my preferred method of knowledge absorption is contact with super smart people. There are some people who make you smarter just by looking at you. My husband is one of those people, as is Doug Lain. I watched Doug Lain give a “reading” at a coffee house in May and he blew my mind with criticism of consumer culture like I’d never even heard of it before.

5. Tell us about the most fun you have had in life?

5. When I was in college my best friend and I drove out to the Salt Flats, this huge flat expanse of salt-y earth that was once “Lake Bountiful,” in Utah. We parked at a creepy rest stop and walked out until we couldn’t even see the highway. It was the middle of the night and the ground looked exactly like the sky and there was nothing for miles. We spun around in circles and played tag. It was stupidly fun.
OR! I just got back from a roadtrip to San Diego with Eraserhead Press. Eraserhead Press is made up of the coolest people in the entire world. We stopped at five different breweries for amazing beer and food, spent three days going to parties with famous authors and other cool people, threw a party with homebrewed beer brewed by the owner of Eraserhead Press, and sold a ton of awesome books to totally unsuspecting fantasy fans. Also stupidly fun.