Mary Shaffer
Author of Wick and Arrow
The daughter of a visual artist and a high school English teacher, Mary Shaffer grew up in a hundred-year-old farmhouse in rural Minnesota. Now she lives in a hundred-year-old house in small-town Wisconsin with her cat Sebastian, named for the maddeningly charming character from Brideshead Revisited.
Mary earned a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Theatre at St. Olaf College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with Departmental Distinction. She also holds a Masters of Arts in Theology from the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. In addition to being cofounder and co-artistic director of Missed the Boat Theatre, she is a freelance web designer at Inscape Web Design.
Her artistic philosophy and practice is heavily influenced by the work of Jacques Maritain, especially his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry.
“Art... breaks into human life and human affairs like a moon prince or a mermaid into a custom office or a congregation; it will always make trouble and arouse suspicion.”