Brandon R. Schrand is the author of The Enders Hotel: A Memoir, the 2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize winner, and a 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dallas Morning News, The Utne Reader, Tin House, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, Columbia, Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, River Teeth, Ecotone, Isotope, and numerous other publications. He has won the Wallace Stegner Prize, the 2006 Willard R. Espy Award, the Pushcart Prize, two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, and his essay, “The Enders Hotel,” the title piece from his memoir, was a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2007. A two-time grant recipient of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, he lives in Moscow, Idaho, with his wife and two children where he coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho.

In answer to our question of why he writes, Brandon responded:

“The possibility of discovery. Like many writers, I suppose I write to discover. Wasn’t it E.M. Forester who famously quipped, ’How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?’ I write to discover what I think, or might think about any given subject. About failure or air or lost letters or whatever. There is a certain thrill, I think, in discovering hitherto unseen connections that unfurl themselves before you in the writing process. You have that Ah-ha! moment. So discovery or its possibility is both a satisfying thing and an incentive to keep writing. What will I discover tomorrow, you ask? Well, sit down and begin writing and see what crops up. That’s what keeps me moving forward. That—and good coffee.”

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