I was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois (also the birthplace of Carl Sandburg). After graduating from Galesburg High School in 1980, I received a BS in English education from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (1984); then earned an MA in English with a concentration in fiction writing from SIUC (1995). While at Southern the first time around, I studied creative writing with Philip Graham. For my thesis I wrote part of a novel, “Nudes in Natural Light,” and my committee was Kent Haruf (chair), Beth Lordan and Ricardo Cortez Cruz. (None of my thesis has seen the light of publishing, by the way, but I wrote a few stories based on the characters from “Nudes,” including “Missing the Earth,” which was a Top 25 Finalist in one of Glimmer Train Press’s fiction contests, and the story was eventually published in Oak Bend Review, March/April 2009. Also, “The Composure of Death” appeared in Pisgah Review.)

In 2002, I was accepted into the PhD program at Illinois State University, and earned my doctorate in English studies in 2009 with the successful defense of my dissertation “Zeitgeist and the Zone: The Psychic Correlation between Cultural Trauma and ‘Postmodern’ Literature.” My committee was Robert McLaughlin (chair), Curtis White and Susan Kim. My primary scholarly interest is postmodernism, and I’ve published and presented conference papers on Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and, especially, William H. Gass.

I grew up around the newspaper business as my father and uncle worked for the Galesburg Register-Mail, and I was a sports writer there, part-time, for seven years during high school and college. I also did some graduate work in journalism at the University of Iowa in the mid 1980s — news and feature writing, photojournalism, and page layout and design, too.

My combined interests in English, creative writing, and journalism and publishing led to my founding a small literary journal, A Summer’s Reading, in the late 1990s; I published seven annual issues between 1997 and 2004. I put the journal on (apparently permanent) hiatus to pursue my PhD. In 2007, however, my friend and colleague Joanna Beth Tweedy asked me to help her launch a new literary journal, coupled with a public-radio program, which led to the establishment of Quiddity international literary journal and public-radio program. I was involved in editing four issues of Quiddity before resigning to devote more time to my own writing and publishing. I’m happy to report that Quiddity is still going strong in my editorial absence. I have maintained my connection to Quiddity by reading fiction submissions.

Like just about everyone who cuts his writing teeth in a university program, I was taught to write contemporary literary fiction — meaning stories set in the “here and now” — and my earliest short stories tended to be contemporary. However, for the past fifteen years or so I’ve been attracted to a different literary form, a form which is often labeled “revisionist.” Revisionist fiction is based on earlier, well-known pieces of literature. In essence a writer will take a “classic” novel and use its plot and/or characters to write something new. I became aware of revisionist fiction per se while working on my master’s, and Jean Rhys’s novella Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a prequel to Jane Eyre, may have been the first piece of revisionist fiction that I read while being fully aware of its revisionist nature. About that time I also read J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, which is a retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (and other lesser known Defoe texts).

I was totally mesmerized by both Wide Sargasso Sea and Foe, and I’ve read them many times since those initial encounters. The intertextuality of revisionist fiction has been endlessly fascinating to me. That is to say, I’ve been fascinated how the contemporary works can stand on their own as meaningful and beautiful pieces of literature without the reader’s awareness of their being revisions of classic novels (and I’m sure there have been many admirers of both tales who had no idea they were reading narratives that were inspired by earlier narratives); but I’ve also been fascinated how an awareness of the earlier texts affects a reader’s reception of the revisionist works.

I was hooked and have sought out revisionist fiction ever since. To date my revisionist work has included a retelling of Herman Melville’s Typee, Weeping with an Ancient God; and three works inspired by Mary Shelley, especially Frankenstein: An Untimely Frost (a novel based loosely on the life and times of Mary), Mrs Saville (a sequel to Frankenstein), and Aspiring Child: A Biography of Mary W. Shelley in Sonnets.

In addition to writing short stories, novels, novellas, and poetry, I also enjoy writing critical books and articles, reviews, and translations.

In 2012 I founded Twelve Winters Press, modeling it after Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s legendary Hogarth Press, with the twin missions of bringing out my own hard-to-place work as well as the excellent but difficult-to-pigeonhole work of others. In the years since I’ve expanded Twelve Winters entities with the online Twelve Winters Journal and Twelve Winters Miscellany; and the monthly podcast A Lesson before Writing (with Brady Harrison and Grant Tracey).