Short version:
Arie Farnam is a newspaper correspondent turned creative nonfiction and speculative fiction writer. She’s also a candlemaker, an herbalist, a legally blind wilderness hiker, the off-road mama of two teenagers, sidekick to a guide dog named Conway, an idealist with a practical streak, and author of the Kyrennei Series. She grew up outside La Grande, Oregon and spent twenty years living and working in Central and Eastern Europe before returning to the Blue Mountains.
Long version:
Arie Farnam grew up on Pumpkin Ridge on the edge of the Grande Ronde Valley and attended La Grande and Spray high schools. She has been legally blind since birth and has always been interested in social inclusion in all forms. When she was twenty-two, she graduated from Lawrence University with a BA in Slavic linguistics and struck out for Eastern Europe to work as a freelance newspaper reporter. After writing about conflict and social problems for The Christian Science Monitor and Business Week in Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and the Ukraine, she settled in the Czech Republic and married her patient and unflappable husband Dušan. She has traveled and written in over thirty countries to date, including Bangladesh, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Ecuador as well as most of Central and Eastern Europe. She also produced and directed the documentary film Walls about school segregation and Romani children in the Czech Republic. She has now returned to La Grande, Oregon where she is growing a garden, and trying to live on the earth in a sustainable way.
She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Oregon University in June 2026. Look for her short story “The Canteen” in Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy, June 2026.
