A native of Northern New England, I have written stories, essays, plays, reviews, and three novels, Lighting the World (Whitepoint Press, 2015), Plowing Up A Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs Of Heaven (Soho Press, 2000), trade paperback (Berkley Press, 2001). I edited Meteor in the Madhouse, the posthumous novellas of Leon Forrest, published by Northwestern University Press in 2001. The Suburbs of Heaven, chosen by Barnes and Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series, has been given rave reviews by the New York Times, Newsday and other media. My flash fiction (from a collection-in-progress, Shrunken Heads, miniature portraits of the famous among us) has appeared in Amoskeag, Meetinghouse, Night Train, The Kenyon Review, Rumble, Sub-Lit, Word Riot, Bound Off, JMWW, Eclectica, Toasted Cheese, Foliate Oak, SN Review, Bartleby Snopes, (Short) Fiction Collective, Short, Fast, and Deadly, Molotov Cocktail, and 971 Menu.
I received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council.
The father of three sons, I live in Concord, N.H. A hunter-gatherer, I write and freelance edit.
I received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council.
The father of three sons, I live in Concord, N.H. A hunter-gatherer, I write and freelance edit.
Why I Write
|
What I Write
|
|
Telling stories is my birthright.
I grew up in a 1950s New Hampshire mill town, where truth came in tales from parents, neighbors, church parables, radios shows, and the constant talk, gossip and lies, secrets and revelations, whispers that should have been shouts, shouts that should have been whispers. We hunted truth and wisdom with stories the way scientists used test tubes and microscopes, math and theories. We found the universal in the particular. Our philosophies were based on everyday observations. Life didn’t come with a rule book, and those who told us it did were deluded or liars. Life came with tears and laughter, pleasure and pain. The mill boss handing out an apple apiece to workers on Christmas Eve. The husband mixing up the cups when he tried to poison his wife. The town that protected men who had murdered a man “who needed killing.” The man who broke the old dishes because his wife refused to use the new ones until the old ones were gone. I learned to mistrust generalities, stereotypes, and comforting lies. That has served me well. I love to read stories, hear stories, tell jokes and anecdotes. I write all sorts of tales from the briefest flash fictions to novels that lumber downstairs in the dark of night to eat my cheese and drink my beer. |
My writing focuses on ordinary people who by
insisting on the primacy of their own visions and the value of their souls
become extraordinary. Many of my characters
are poor people, struggling to grasp dignity and hold onto their hearts’
treasure. Others are mechanics, farmers, secretaries, housekeepers, heavy
equipment operators, all the great unglamorous. Slighted by pop culture and
mass media, they are rich in spirit, humor, feistiness and pathos.
Though life pours acid on their hopes, though they bear the fingerprints of unfairness on their throats, they grapple love and care and beauty to their hearts. They have a wider view of life than others credit them with, even if they have to gather every resource of wit and experience, spit and spirit, to wrestle their demons. I shape their lives into realistic stories because they pride themselves on realism, but I stretch the fiction so the narrative can catch their wonder. 
|