I was reared in a community of strict fundamentalist Christians in rural West Virginia, where the church was central to all existence. My dad was the pastor. I spent my formative years steeped in an atmosphere of fear and expectation. The fear was first and foremost of earning God’s displeasure; it was also of the Enemy Satan, and his earthly minions: communists, feminists, evolutionists, atheists, lesbians, etc. The expectation was of Jesus’ imminent return to Rapture us, then, after the seven-year Great Tribulation, the Apocalyptic, blood-drenched end to all human history.
I learned to read early, cutting my teeth on the 1611 Authorized King James Bible, and wrote my first work of fiction when I was six or seven. In it a submarine sinks to the bottom of the sea, and the crew are rescued by an English galleon of the sort used to defeat the Spanish Armada. I didn’t know that’s what the ship was at the time. I only knew I liked drawing them.
Through middle school and into high school, I was not a good student, but I did continue to read and write, mostly bad poetry in an attempt to impress girls. When I was a first-year college student and not yet eighteen, an English professor assigned Breece Pancake’s short story “Trilobites.” I bought the slight collection of Pancake’s stories, studied them, and started crafting stories of my own.
Through college, the Marine Corps (and the Gulf War), and seminary, I trudged along a tortuous route of deconstruction and exit from the religion of my youth, and I continued to study and write fiction, finding particular inspiration in haunted writers like Flannery O’Conner and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I moved through various occupations over the years but maintained a habit of rising early to get some words in before the rest of the house began to stir. I owned and operated a café/coffee shop in Lynchburg VA called The Drowsy Poet from 1998 to 2006, when I sold the shop and enrolled in an MFA program. Upon completion of the program in 2008, I began my career of teaching college English and collecting rejections.
My short fiction and nonfiction appear in many journals. I have published one story collection, I Love You I’m Leaving; and one essay collection, Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus. My novel God of River Mud was published in 2024 and was selected for the 2025 Tennessee Book Award.
I am thankful and excited to have Regal House publishing my first work of speculative fiction, the literary science fiction The Unborn Simone Gordon in 2028.
