I was one month into my freshman year of college when my father was in a car accident. It left him comatose for nearly six months before he succumbed to his injuries. Even then, at eighteen, writing fiction was a way—maybe the only way—for me to try to understand the world.
The son and sibling of immigrants, I was the first in my family to attend college. My parents survived World War II and made their way to a small blue-collar town in northeastern Illinois to pursue the proverbial American dream, carrying with them their accents and ancestry, customs and culture—and twisted family secrets.
After college, I began to publish some of my short stories and I completed my MFA. I even won a few awards. Then, life seemed to get in the way—a career in marketing and communications, a long daily commute, a mortgage, children.
Before I realized it, I had stopped writing. I thought that part of me had disappeared.
But years later, the urgency to write returned, and I began drafting my debut novel, A Place Called Normal. It’s an immigrant story about the weight of secrets, the power of memory, the will to survive, and, ultimately, love and mercy.
Like the young writer I was, I am still trying to write my way toward some kind of comprehension of how we live in the world—and of my own family’s complex past. The Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro said it best: In the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?
I’m a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. My short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines. I’ve been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology, and I was a finalist in the Ploughshares’ Emerging Writers’ Contest. I’m at work on a new novel about a dysfunctional family and their attempt to mend their broken relationships.
Born and raised in Illinois, I live with my wife, Deanna, in Bend, Oregon. We have two adult children.
Find me on Substack, Instagram, Bluesky, and at neallulofs.com.
