Winner of W. S. Porter Prize
Writing, my default. I read a patchwork of things growing up, but the one constant, because it was on a shelf in my bedroom, was a set of Mark Twain’s writings that had belonged to one of my grandparents. I was a non-Mormon in Mormon Salt Lake City in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Seemed every kid had a governing narrative except me. Twain? I spun stories to myself, a kind of internal echo location. In junior high and high school I wrote assemblies. Summers I gathered material without intending it. I played a villain in a melodrama in Park City. I worked at a wool warehouse, there was such a thing, worked on a guest ranch. I was okay in classes, but I fudged. In English I said I’d read Crime and Punishment. I didn’t say it was the Classic Comic version. I told people I wanted to be a zoologist because I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t keep animals, from skinks, to toads, to a pygmy rabbit.
Call my first year at Colorado College Death of a Zoologist Laid Low by the Memorization of Worm Parts. Call my first year desultory. Then my second a year I signed up for a creative writing class with visiting writing professor James Yaffe. That class woke language, literature, and, to my own surprise, me. With Mr. Yaffe’s oversight—I can’t help but call him that—I cut loose for a semester and ended up in Ireland, sending him pages. I became acquainted with the Irish Travelers, the indigenous Irish gypsies, and a brilliant schizophrenic former novelist named John Gerard Murphy who crawled beside city buses writing his girlfriend’s name with his finger in the dust. Fodder.
Later, Mr. Yaffe would say, “You’re a writer,” after he had dismantled a piece I had written. I asked him how he could say that. “Writers write,” he said. I did do that.
I returned to Ireland on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to write a novel about the Travellers. That blew up when a horse deal went wrong. I ended up living in a thatched cottage on the sea in County Clare. In a horse-farming community. I bought a horse—Bart Howarya—who towed me to town in a cart, a gig, loaned to me by a neighbor. I adopted a dog, Jim M’boy, and wrote a bunch of junk for nine months, until I got restless and joined Duffy Brothers’ Circus as a roustabout, sleeping on a bunk in the back of a semi above a guy who stilt-walked and performed with a Himalayan bear.
So that’s the formative, unlikely path that began to straighten after a year of demeaning jobs when I landed a place in the tiny MA writing program at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia. I wrote poetry as I explored the history of the west, Utah, before the Mormons: the explorers, the fur trappers, the indigenous people. That led to a book of poems, Pulpit of Bones that actually got published! The next year, with no prior teaching, I was made the first Poet-in-Residence in the Roanoke schools, working with all grades. I loved it.
I was admitted to the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, back to my roots. I wrote a long polygamist novel that won prizes but is still in a drawer. I was a Poet-in-the Schools. My first teaching job followed, two years at Marshall University in West Virginia. I worked on a novel, Sirens. Writers write!
I finished Sirens, which became a Vintage paperback, at Iowa State University, where I taught next. I won teaching awards. I took almost a dozen classes to Ireland. I co-founded Iowa State’s MFA in Creative Writing and Environment. I co-founded a bookstore, Big Table. I founded a literary journal, Flyway. I became coordinator of the program. I taught for six years in the Fort Dodge prison. All good. But then I got itchy. I’d taught American Indian literature, and I heard about a job in New Mexico at a new secondary school, the Native American Preparatory School. My wife, Clare, who taught architecture, and I took leave, relocated, and stayed two years. The students, from 35 tribes, were astonishingly alive and generous. I was voted Teacher of the Year twice, maybe my proudest professional accomplishment.
Now we live in Santa Fe. I write short stories—writers write!–play guitar, hike, fly fish, and teach in the county jail, before Covid in the New Mexico State Prison.
So writing. Good thing I discovered it in myself. I interviewed Leslie Marmon Silko once—the great Leslie Silko—and she said if she hadn’t been a writer she’d have been in jail. I doubt I would have ended up in jail, but I would have to have found another story.
All this and plenty of luck, including the W.S. Porter Prize awarded to my story collection.
