Aimee Loiselle likes drinking green tea while she writes, and the need to repeatedly boil water provides soothing little breaks.  Her story “Souvenirs” will appear in the anthology American Fiction: The Best Previously Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers Volume 11 from New Rivers Press in fall 2010. Please read her story "He Used to Say Te Quiero Everyday" in the 2010 issue of Steam Ticket—buy a copy and support puny literary writers like Aimee.  She’s also completed a novel manuscript titled Being Good About It, which was a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition, and selected as a finalist for the 2010 Bellwether Prize sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver. Aimee was selected as a fiction finalist for The Loft Mentor Series based on an excerpt.  Her favorite candy recently changed from peanut-butter cups to Jolly Ranchers.

Aimee Loiselle likes to cook when the weather is cool.  She makes New England pot roast or curry chicken in coconut milk or meatloaf or chicken soup or couscous with cashews.  She also lives with the standard poodle she adopted from a local shelter, and her right knee gets rather sore when she sits through a movie in the theater—two more bizarre facts from life in her late thirties.

Aimee Loiselle traveled around the United States with her dog, Lucy, throughout the 1990s.  Lucy was a shepherd mix of exceptional intelligence and companionship.  After years together, Lucy lost functioning in her tail, her hips, and eventually her insides.  For the first time in 16 years, Lucy went into an examining room at the veterinarian office and quietly lay down.  Aimee was the one who suddenly felt the urge to turn and run out the door.  The next day, Aimee was not a girl with her dog but rather a weird single thirty-something woman.

Aimee Loiselle carries six canvas bags in the trunk of her car so she always has them for shopping.  Her earliest memories of recycling include lugging bundles of newspapers and bags of glass bottles to the town’s public–works building, where the Boy Scouts tossed them into giant bins.  Although Aimee also tries to walk or ride her bike for errands, she does love to get in a car and drive far far away.  She often forgets to pack enough underwear, booze, or granola bars but has discovered there are ways to adapt to those situations.

Aimee Loiselle taught several academic subjects in an alternative school for pregnant and parenting girls in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  The students taught Aimee about patience, endurance, finding joy, expressing anger, and the human need for trust and caring without pity.  She also learned that a party is not a fiesta without the pernil and arroz con gandules.  Gracias por todo.

Aimee Loiselle has flown to Europe twice.  The first time she was 20-years-old and landed in Madrid.  A colossal airtight bus drove her and several Dartmouth students past miles of olive groves to Granada to meet their host families.  The second time she was 26-years-old and landed in Milan.  She and a friend rode the trains around Italy and France.  On a trip to Rome, she shared a train car with Woody Harrelson but didn’t get a photograph.  She decided to play the cool and worldly American traveler who wasn’t enamored of celebrity.

Aimee Loiselle ate a lot of bacon and eggs when she was a toddler.  She stopped eating eggs at about age six and didn’t touch them for almost 15 years, until a college trip to southern Spain.  Her Spanish family served fried eggs and Spanish tortillas, which consist of eggs and potatoes.  Now Aimee cooks eggs quite frequently and prefers scrambled eggs with diced cheese.  While housesitting in 1998, she even gathered her own eggs from chickens wandering freely around her colleague’s house in rural Massachusetts.

Aimee Loiselle is the oldest of three sisters who grew up in western Massachusetts.  When Aimee was little, her mom refused to buy her a Barbie doll. Instead, Aimee had a Daisy doll in a navy-blue bathing suit that made her look like an Olympic swimmer. As the oldest, Aimee also had her mouth washed out with soap, her butt spanked, and was grounded to her room–but she feels these hardships only made her stronger. Aimee’s youngest sister, on the other hand, received a Barbie and a pink corvette. Neither of her sisters ever had their mouths washed out with soap.

Aimee Loiselle and her sisters liked to play suspenseful games of hide-n-go-seek with their dad. They often fought over the top three hiding spots–a clothes hamper, broom closet, and kitchen cabinet. Her dad encouraged the three girls to play in other competitions as well, including softball, the zim-zam tennis game, bicycling, soccer, and any other sport that gave him an opportunity to swear.