BIO Born in MI, 1974. People who died on my birthday (not the year but the day) include Wallace Stevens, Raymond Carver and William Burroughs. For a long time after that babyhood, childhood, adolescence, shit jobs. I played in bands starting at 17 all the way through 24. Went to Western Michigan University, one of two schools I applied to, the other one was Kalamazoo College and I had to twist their arm to let me in, show them a lot of my "creative writing", my teacher helped me a lot with this, setting up meetings and so forth, they finally let me in but I couldn't go anyway because it was something like 18 grand a year, which seems cheap now I guess, and I don't think I really wanted to go because they had a really rigid program where you travel abroad and I'm sure I was afraid to travel then because I kind of am now too. Went to WMU for five years instead of four because I did a little intentional fucking around, got my BA and wrote a lot and hung out with friends. For a year after graduation I was a substitute teacher, this was a good time but exhausting, plus the old post-grad blues and angst. Finally in the fall of 1998 I moved to NY not because it was my lifelong dream but because none of my great pals had really stuck it out in MI and a couple of them had gone to NY and got this apartment out there so I just latched on to the deal. Tried to find a lot of different kinds of groovy jobs like "editor" or "editorial assistant" at magazines and things but was denied. Several months of struggle and no money then I got a job as a Wall Street copywriter--the internet was hot and Wall St was booming--one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me but I met some of my best friends in those years and got a hip city girlfriend and had a different kind of life for a while with steak frites for dinner and going to the beach and things. Got another Wall St job but for a lot more money at a bigger company in the World Trade Center and that was exciting for a while but I was trying to kick start my "writing career" and realized I was wasting a lot of time and couldn't get a lot of work done and my work was getting rejected a lot so I was thinking about making some big changes and then September 11 happened and it had a pretty profound effect on me so I quit my job and went to grad school and wrote the novel Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way. It's a short book but took a long time to write because I didn't know what I was doing. I wrote a lot of pages for three years and then cut it all down to what's in there now. I worked a couple more nightmarish office jobs to support myself and met a few more great people but also many more people who drove me up a wall. These days I'm working on a new novel.

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