I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in October 1957, six
days into the Space Age. It was obvious from an early age that I was a dreamy, bookish kid. It was equally obvious that my parents had little or no appreciation for my sensitive nature, and would spend the next eighteen years plunging me into one terrifying, dangerous situation after another. The picture at right was taken in about 1959, on Skillman Street, where my family lived in North Brooklyn. You can tell from the expression on my face what I think of being perched atop an unpredictable wild animal. (I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to where the pony came from.) •
• •
Catholic school
ensued. The first
eight years of my sentence were carried out at the Nativity School and
Our Lady of Grace, both in Brooklyn (which is a little like saying Europe—for
a sense of how native New Yorkers experience the city,
see Fast
Over Thin Ice: Hate's In Season).
I attended St. Francis Prep for my freshman year of high school,
flunking everything but the Kayak and Canoe Team. I fled to
Xaverian High School, from which I managed to graduate despite my best
efforts to the contrary. High school actually broke the Catholic school
mold for me. Though I was an indifferent student, because of Xaverian's
intellectual and liberal atmosphere, it was the first place in my life
that I really felt at home; the first school where a
life of the mind mattered. While I was at Xaverian Nixon resigned and
the Vietnam war ended. I discovered Darwin, karate and girls in high
school (it was an all boy school, but the friends I made there
led me to an avid extra-curricular study of the opposite sex). It was
the kind of school where required reading for one religion course was Man's
Search for Meaning,
Victor Frankl's account of his imprisonment in Nazi concentration
camps. Even an indifferent student couldn't help but be enlarged by
exposure to a curriculum like that.
•
• •
 Xaverian
aside, years of enforced tedium and arbitrary punishment turned out to
be ideal preparation for the military. In July of 1976 I enlisted in
the U.S. Coast Guard. The photo at left is the standard boot camp head
shot the services keep on file in case you do something very good, or
something very bad happens to you. The public affairs office never had occasion to dig out my file
photo. I served with a minimum amount of distinction aboard the cutters
Cape George
and Gallatin,
and on small boats (boats under 65 feet in length according to Coast Guard
nomenclature) with the Aids to Navigation Team at Woods Hole.•
• •
I received an honorable discharge from the
Coast Guard in 1980, and
spent the next decade in and out of college. I
took a dozen odd jobs in that period (merchant seaman, office temp,
writing tutor, security guard, and electrician, to name a few), and
eventually graduated from Brooklyn College with a bachelor's degree in
journalism and history.•
• •
By
the time I left the Coast Guard I'd known I wanted to be a writer, a
science fiction writer. The first modern science fiction novel I read, in high school, was The Nets of Space, by Emil Petaja,
a very strange melange of Don Quixote and giant crabs—it's a
wonder I went back to the well. (I'd previously read Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so maybe I was innoculated.)
I moved on to Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, of course, then Philip Jose
Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, and too many
others to list. Under these heady influences, I began to try out my own
fiction wings, typing out, hunt-and-peck, lurid
tales of other worlds, and sending them off to the magazines. I
collected many, many form rejection slips. Then, in 1985, Everything Changed.•
• •
I was standing in my apartment in Brooklyn chatting with my roommate,
when the
phone rang. It was Mary Sheridan, the administrative assistant at the  Clarion
Writer’s Workshop at Michigan State University. She
was
calling to tell me that my manuscript and application to the six-week
annual workshop had been accepted. Holy shit, I was in! Maybe not
everyone is as deeply affected by their experiences at Clarion as I
was. Some of my classmates, who seemed deeply engaged at the time, now
discount the experience. Even twenty years down the line, however, that
six weeks stands out as the watershed experience of my life. I formed a
deep attachment to the people I met that summer (not to mention the
couch in the dorm lobby, right), and even those I don’t keep
in
touch with now had a powerful influence on me. Several are still close
friends. (For an account of that summer from another perspective, see
William Shunn’s Clarion
Memoir.)
I’d never been in one place with so many smart, creative, quick
people. It was a humbling experience, and sometimes a painful one, but
I learned a more about writing, and about myself, than I had in the 27
years up to that point.•
• •
Fame and fortune followed. Actually, no, that’s someone
else’s life. But I did get published, eventually: in the
spring
of 1989 I sold my first story, “Last Tango in
Brooklyn,” to
Jessica Amanda Salmonson, editor of Fantasy Macabre.
Over the next few years I published almost a dozen short stories in
various magazines (see my bibliography for the full list), then my
literary output ground to a halt. In the following decade I graduated
from college, worked in the public
relations office of my alma mater, got married, moved to Oregon, worked
for The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction,
got divorced, left F&SF, worked as a veterinary technician at
an
emergency animal  hospital, moved back to New York, and took a writing job at a college. •
• •
Finally,
in the fall of 2003, I picked up the pen again. The first story I wrote
after my long hiatus was “Entropy’s
Girlfriend,”
which appeared in the October 2005 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. I've been working steadily, if deliberately, since, and have made more sales to Analog and Salon.com. The entire list is on the bibliography page. If I’m getting better at this
strange occupation, at least some of the credit goes to my writing
workshop, the 8th of
February Group. I work for a small
technology company in Manhattan, and live in Brooklyn, New York, not far from the Gerritsen Inlet, where the
picture at left was taken. |
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