When I’d hand in short stories and plays instead of keyboard exercises, my ninth grade typing teacher encouraged me to keep writing fiction and drama. Great teacher, right? His support was the beginning of my writing life. By my late twenties I’d drafted two novels and started joining and/or assembling fiction writers’ groups.
I taught high school––literature and writing, mostly creative writing, luckily enough––a great career for over twenty-five years. I’d write fiction, drama and poetry on weekends and school vacations. While attending summer school at the University of London, I was inspired to write a literary mystery, Nothing Gold Can Stay, which turned out to be my first published novel and was nominated by the Lambda Awards for Best Mystery. I’m not really a mystery writer but simply fictionalized an actual mortal threat against a fellow student in the international dorms.
That sparked a vocation as an accidental mystery novelist, inspired by real events I was close to or implicated in (though I’ve never murdered anyone or been murdered). I wrote two more “mysteries,” Love and Genetic Weaponry and Fresh Grave in Grand Canyon.
At the same time, I was enjoying a ten-year spell as an accidental playwright. While not really a theatre person, I was an avid playgoer and felt challenged to write for the stage. Denver’s legendary Changing Scene, devoted to new works, produced several of my satirical one-acts. My first full-length play, The Houseguest, won Tucson’s Borderlands Prize. My next play, Orwell in Orlando, landed me a slot in Ashland, Oregon’s New Works Festival.
Fun as play writing was, I felt more devoted to prose fiction. I read a lot of classic and contemporary literary fiction and decided to concentrate on writing literary novels of my own. I ended up selling three novels centered on younger protagonists’ struggles and successes with coming out and coming of age, more new adult in genre than young adult––My Aim Is True, Every Summer Day, and Coming to Life on South High. The Last Californians continues this theme in the context of a bisexual collegiate love triangle. In each, I focused on the protagonists’ web of family and friend relationships as well as their deep connection to their native ground.
For me, native ground was the Mendocino Coast in rural northwestern California. After college, I settled in another gorgeous place, Colorado, and both locales have influenced my fiction deeply. For my characters, the surrounding geography is more than a setting; it’s another web of complex connection. I wrote about the problematic survival of Western wilds in my first poetry collection, In Disturbed Soil.
As a habitual traveler, I’ve had my share of accidental and problematic timing, with what seems to be a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time. I arrived in Southeast Asia during avian flu and India just after the Mumbai terror attacks. I left Rio the day before Carnival and arrived in New Orleans the day after Mardi Gras; I had to depart Melbourne the day before Pride began. But my times in beautiful artists’ colonies such as MacDowell, Ucross, and the Anderson Center were just right to keep pounding the keyboard with new stories to hand in.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Lee Patton’s The Last Californians in the spring of 2027.
