Samantha Burns

Artist Statement

My name is Sam (Samantha) Burns, and I am an emerging writer from the Adirondacks. In my work, I am trying to create honest portraits of contemporary rural life. Currently, the way into that for me is through experimentations with formalism and the surreal, specifically in the short story form. Some stories I write live one degree away from poetry, while others are restrained, realistic, and traditional. The trait these modes share is compression—in length, in sentence structure, and in imagery. I want to distill a story to its most essential form. The surreal images in my work all return to the rural landscape where I am from. While I don’t consider myself a nature writer, nature imagery is lodged into the deepest part of my subconscious, and this contributes to both the depictions of the wild landscape and the imagery inside each of my characters’ minds

Georgia O'Keefe painting of Lake George. Lake George is a very beautiful and unique lake in the southern Adirondacks. It is also the setting for the title story in my debut short story collection, There Are No Strangers Here.

BIO

My name is Sam (Samantha) Burns, and I’m a fiction writer and editor. I grew up in North River, New York, a hamlet located in the southern Adirondacks. I earned my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Alongside my debut short story collection, I am also working on an environmental science fiction novel about industrialism, family dynamics, and class. My work has been published in or is forthcoming from Bennington Review, Terrain.org, Fence, and Smokelong Quarterly. In 2024, I was selected to take part in residencies from Yaddo and the Ucross Foundation. Additionally, I was also awarded an individual artist’s grant from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. My work has also been supported by Community of Writers and the Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency. Aside from my interest in fiction, I cohost and edit a podcast with the poet and memoirist Stacy Boe about balancing writing and working full-time. (The podcast is called WorkWhile.) I also occasionally moonlight as a whitewater raft guide on the Hudson River Gorge and raft completely for fun on the Salmon River with friends in Idaho. I currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my partner, the poet Oscar Oswald.