Only my grandmother could get me pried away from that pint-sized waterfall. She had serious business to conduct out there. I was diverting precious water from the wooden beer keg she'd somehow commandeered from the Schmidt Brewery down the block. This rain barrel was one of her domestic treasures. She had strategically placed it to catch rainwater that, with peasant shrewdness, she pronounced to be the purest water in the world, a sort of pagan holy water available to those housewives (too few!) sage enough to provide themselves with a giant beer keg to procure this elixir for their fortunate families. Hers was a hunting and gathering economy. She was the sort of housewife who practically cackled as she loaded the shelves of her cellar closet with pints and quarts of stewed plums and tomato sauce she had ‘put up.’”

– from “Showered with Bounty,” Minneapolis StarTribune, Sunday October 22, 2006
Ms. Hampl’s short story “The Bill Collector’s Vacation,” was awarded a 1999 Pushcart Prize and was cited in Best American Short Stories. Her essay, “A Week in the Word,” was included in Best American Essays 1999. Another essay, “Other People’s Secrets,” appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology for 2001.

Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, and Kenyon Review.