Born in Berkeley, Ca., ended up in Aurora, NY, via Iowa and Wisconsin. An early memory is waking up late in my grandfather’s house near Deansboro NY in a room with a blue rug, and smelling coffee. Jumping up to look out the window, make sure the pond was still there. Another memory, earlier, my friend chasing me around her house and down into the basement wielding a devil puppet and leaving me there.
That me is still there, waiting.
The other side of my family comes from NYC, where my agent is now.
When I was a teenager, I ran away from home when my parents told us we were moving to Australia. I came back and we ended up in Sydney. The next time I went to my grandfather’s house it was to bury him, put the place up for auction, sell the furniture he and his wife had brought with them from Vienna.
I got my BA in American Studies from the University of Canterbury, NZ, where I discovered William Gibson, Philip K Dick, Neal Stephenson, DeLillo, Pynchon, Linda Hogan, Sojourner Truth… and PhD’ed at the University of New South Wales, where I read, really read, Melville and Hammett and Poe. Wrote my first novel, Viper, which never got published, not for want of trying. Helped pay the rent by writing copy and book reviews.
Before and between grad school, we lived for periods of time on the West Coast, in LA and San Diego, where my NYC family ended up, where I got to spend some precious years with my other grandparents, made them a couple of great-grandchildren to play with. I get there as often as I can.
I wrote for the San Diego Herald Tribune a little, and in Sydney published film and book reviews, got some fiction out there, have a day job teaching writing and English and sometimes film studies. My breakthrough poem was in 2009, ‘Untitled’ for Retort Magazine. It’s about losing a friend, which happened when I was 19, which is when I became a writer.
Since then, I wrote a novel Blue Moves, which won a couple of prizes and is now in very good hands at SJGA, NYC, where my next one, American Monster is heading. A collection of stories, Ink, came out on Independence Day 2011.
