Kate Moses was born in San Francisco in 1962 to a British father and an American mother, and grew up in various parts of the United States before returning to California to attend university. She subsequently worked as an editor in publishing and as literary director at San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, and in 1997 became one of the two founding editors of Salon.com's Mothers Who Think website, which led to the American Book Award-winning anthology Mothers Who Think, co-edited with Camille Peri. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two children. Wintering is her first novel.
"I'm a seventh-generation Californian, and my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter, and myself were all born in San Francisco -- my mother, daughter, and myself all at the same hospital."
"I decided I would be a writer when I was four years old, while sitting at my mother's feet as she sewed on her mother's old Singer sewing machine and told family stories with her mother and sisters (my grandmother and aunts). As little snips of fabric snowed down on me and I listened -- unobserved -- to the stories told by the women in my family, I suddenly realized that's all I wanted to do with my life: to tell stories."
"I have never been to a writing workshop, retreat, or residency program. The only writing class I ever took was as a sophomore in college, and I ended up dropping out of school for the semester and getting an Incomplete for the class. After college graduation I talked my way into a job as an editor at a small literary trade publishing house called North Point Press in Berkeley, California: My strategy was to learn to write, surreptitiously, by working with 'real' writers. I published my first short story when I was 23; the story was part of a fiction competition and was published with my photograph. Someone recognized me in the grocery store and I was so appalled to have my imagination made so public and personal that I didn't submit another piece of fiction to a publisher until Wintering, 14 years later."
"Though childhood convinced me that I was going to be a writer, motherhood is what gave me my subject. I don't think I had anything worth writing about until I started re-experiencing the world through the eyes of my children; it is the assembly of the self -- through childhood, through relationships with other people, through parenthood -- that fascinates me as a writer as well as a reader."