I was born in Bowling
Green, Ohio and grew up in the flat, semi-wooded farmland just west of
town. My childhood marked the end of an era, a time before personal
computers became ubiquitous, and certainly long before cell phones, iPods,
and personal webpages like this one. I spent countless hours
wandering through the neighboring fields and woods, wandering through my
imagination, reading. And writing.I knew I wanted to be a writer in the fifth grade,
inspired by the Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock mysteries. I filled pages
of loose-leaf paper with stories, which I read aloud to my younger
brother, my first fan. Later, I typed them on a vintage Royal typewriter,
which I loved. Clattering away on its heavy metal keys, I felt like a real
writer.
At Bowling Green High School, I was co-editor of the
school newspaper The Scarlet Parrot, while in my early twenties, I
co-founded and edited an independent literary magazine, Gestalt.
It ran for six issues from 1988 to 1989 and was briefly resurrected for a
final issue as This! Magazine in 1992. That same year, I earned the
first check for my writing, for a freelance interview/article of Laura
Joplin, sister of rock icon Janis, which appeared in the Cleveland Scene
Magazine.
Shortly afterward, I reentered Bowling
Green State University to complete my undergraduate degree in
creative writing. There I had the good fortune to work with a number of
talented writers who were also talented teachers, including
George Looney,
Wendell Mayo, and Fred Zackel. I’m indebted to them for nurturing the
first great growth in my writing, and for their friendships, which we’ve
maintained to this day.
To help pay for my education, I worked as a staff writer
at the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune;
after graduation, I was promoted to religion editor. I moved on to become
arts editor of the Boise
Weekly from 1997 to 1998. Journalism taught me several
important skills, including the ability to work through distractions (a
must in any newsroom) and to meet strict deadlines. The greatest lesson it
taught me as a writer was simply how to sit at a desk every day, beginning
early in the morning and sometimes lasting late into the evening, working
with words.
Since then, my focus has been on my literary writing:
primarily fiction, but nonfiction and poetry as well. Entering the
creative writing graduate program at Eastern
Washington University inaugurated this phase and sparked the
second great growth in my career.
It’s currently fashionable to criticize formal programs
in creative writing, particularly at the graduate level, but I strongly
believe that their benefits outweigh any perceived shortcomings. Outside of landing grants and
fellowships, entering an MFA program provides one of the few
opportunities for most writers to commit full-time to their writing. I have no doubt that
it would have taken me years of solitary work to gain the experience and
insights that I did in two years at EWU.
There again I was fortunate to study under talented
writers who were also talented teachers: Ursula Hegi, John Keeble, Carolyn
Kremers, Greg Spatz. In particular, I owe a special debt to John, my
advisor. His dedication to his students, eye for detail, fidelity to
language, patience, humor, and great personal warmth combined to make him
not just a wonderful teacher but also a wonderful human being.
Graduate school also introduced me to teaching.
This has proven to be the most rewarding work I’ve done outside of
writing. In many ways, it’s the perfect complement to my writing, pulling
me away from my desk, out of my imagination, and putting me in touch with
other humans.
I greatly enjoyed teaching at Washington
State University, but for the first time in my life, I found
myself in a position to realize a longstanding dream: to volunteer with
the U.S. Peace Corps. Moving to Kazakhstan for what ended up being four
years was the most important and far-reaching decision I’ve made. It
allowed me to give of myself in new ways. In return, this opened me up to
tremendous growth I didn’t expect in my thirties. I refined my teaching
skills and gained invaluable experience speaking and presenting workshops
at various levels—regionally, nationally, and internationally. I visited
places I had never even dreamed of before, couldn’t have, because before
I joined the Peace Corps, I didn’t know many of those places existed.
The year 2004 was a special turning point. I finished my
two years of Peace Corps service in late June and married Val—Valentina
Nikolaevna Dudina—less than two months later in Shymkent, Kazakhstan.
Meeting my wife was the most unexpected and joyful surprise of the many I
enjoyed overseas. We held a wedding reception in a traditional Kazakh yurt
in the
Talassky Alatau mountains (for some photos, please scroll
to the end of this page). That October, I began the most prestigious job I’ve
yet had, as manager of the Edmund
S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program in Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan. I left a year later to prepare for returning to the U.S. and
more fully commit to my writing.
It proved to be a good decision. In January
2006, I learned that my short story “Nuclear Toughskins” won first place
in Many Mountains Moving’s 2005
Flash Fiction Contest. February brought news that a selection
from my first collection of short stories, Making Love While Levitating
Three Feet in the Air, was chosen a grand prizewinner in the Santa Fe
Writers Project’s
2005
Literary Awards Program. In April, I was informed that
I had been selected the
2006
Bernheim Writer-in-Residence. Finally, I was awarded a
2007 Dorothy Norton Clay Fellowship at the
Mary Anderson Center for
the Arts, which allowed me to continue the work I began at Bernheim.
Of course, no one, not even the most independent writer,
succeeds entirely alone, and I must acknowledge the help of my parents,
who sponsored Val and provided other essential support, allowing us to
transition to a new life in the states.
I currently live with my wife in southern Kentucky, where I
teach and write.
Personal Interests
My personal interests are inextricably entwined with my
writing and, like my literary tastes, wide-ranging. Below are just a few;
I will continue to update and add to these as time allows:
