I was born in Rhode Island, grew up in Michigan, and I’ve been living, teaching, and writing in the Boston area for over twenty years. When the weather allows (usually 7-8 months out of the year), I can usually be found reading and writing on my front porch. I live on a busy street but across from a wooded area and a pond. It’s both scenic and not at the same time.
I also live just down the road from a zoo. I enjoy the novelty of this. It’s fun living down the road from things, not just other people’s houses.
I wrote most of my first novel, The Egg Code (Knopf, 2002), while in grad school at Columbia. It’s a “grad school” kind of book. It’s sort of a large cast, po-mo comedy about how the Internet can be used to spread misinformation. When I started writing it in the mid-90s, most people were still using dial-ups.
By the time I wrote my second novel, Pike’s Folly (Knopf, 2006), I was living back in Rhode Island for a brief period. The book is about a wealthy guy who buys a piece of undeveloped property in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for the purpose of paving it over as a stunt. Lots of nudity—transgressive nudity, you might say. Have I piqued your interest?
Most of my third novel, We Came All This Way (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), takes place on an abandoned oil rig in the North Atlantic. There’s an oil rig on the cover. Literal, that.
I’ve also published a novella (Nada, Kindle Singles, 2013) and two collections of stories and essays (The Man Talking Project, Another Sky Press, 2012; This Can Be Easy or Hard, Thought Catalog Books, 2014).
I wrote all of my new novel, Your Thoughts Are Important to Us (forthcoming, Regal House Publishing) in longhand, which was a first for me. I don’t normally like writing in longhand, but it felt right this time. I think I wanted to give myself a sense of risk: if I lost the notebook, the novel would be gone forever. (Unlike on a computer, where you can easily back it up.) I don’t quite know why I wanted that feeling. But I think it’s important not to value things too much. I think a writer should be able to say, “Well, if I lost it, that would be too bad. But then I’d just start over.”
I’m not being facetious. It’s impossible to be creative if you over-value what you’re doing. You have to be reckless and free, not clingy toward your own work.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Mike Heppner’s Your Thoughts Are Important to Us in the summer of 2027.
