I was born in New York, in Rockaway Beach, Queens, and I came of age in the 1950s. When I became a mid-life memoirist, I found that my richest work invariably resulted from mining my most vivid and powerful childhood and adolescent memories. In writing the memoir, Still Pitching, I discovered that almost everything that shaped my adult identity--my passion for baseball, my love of books, theater, rock and roll, jazz and travel, as well as my stubborn tenacity and persistence, my sense of myself as an outsider, and my predilection for kvetching--all grew out of my New York Jewish childhood. I left New York when I was twenty-five and came to Michigan State in the mid-60s to get an M.A. and Ph.D. in English. Though I've lived and taught in Michigan for the better part of the last four decades, in my head, heart--and in my writing--I've never left New York.
Since I was a child, I loved books and writing. In fact, I'd always harbored dreams becoming a writer. But I didn't seriously start pursuing that impulse until I was in my mid-forties. The reason being that I was not a very good poet or fiction writer--the two most prominent literary forms at the time. And because I'd read and taught so much "great" literature, I'd virtually talked myself into believing that my own writing would never measure up. For many years then, I was a writing/composition teacher, a journalist, an occasional playwright, and a director of plays. Early on in my teaching career, however, I'd become enamored of the personal essay. I continued to write, write about, and teach the essay for almost two decades. In the early-90s, when creative nonfiction started to become more prominent, I began sending my work out to literary journals. At the same time, I wrote several essays about the form. In 1992, I went back to school, and in 1994, I got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing.
Up until that time, I'd always considered myself to be a teaching writer. In 1996, I co-authored (with Robert L. Root), Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, a source book that grew out of our experience as co-coordinator of the Traverse Bay Writing Workshops, a writing conference for English teachers. After that, Root and I co-edited The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. We did the book because we wanted to use our own materials in our graduate seminars. It's now going into a third edition and has become a standard text in a number of college creative nonfiction and advanced composition courses.
In 1998, I founded the literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Over the past five years, the journal has won five Pushcart Prizes, gotten several citations in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing, as well as winning an Utne Reader Writing Excellence Award, and a first place award from The Travel Writers of America Society.
As for my own work, in the past fifteen years I've published numerous personal essays and memoirs, as well as interviews and commentary in journals such as The Missouri Review, New Letters, The Bellingham Review, and The Florida Review, among many others. My essays and memoirs have won several national awards, including The Missouri Review Editor's Prize, The National Harness Racing Writers of America Award for Feature Writing, a Writing Self Award, and a Roberts Writing Award. I've also had several pieces cited as "Notable Essays" in Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing. Others have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
I've also written reviews for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, as well as many feature magazine articles for national and regional magazines. From 1974-1976, I wrote a bimonthly column for the Detroit Free Press Magazine.
In addition, I've written and directed several stage plays. A co-authored play, I'm Almost Famous, was produced in 1984 at the Apollo Theater in Chicago.
My most recent book is Still Pitching, a memoir about growing up in New York in '50s, the era that sports historians and journalists refer to as "the golden age of New York baseball." Foreward Magazine recently chose Still Pitching as the 2003 Small/Independent Press memoir of the year and the American Association of University Presses recently chose Still Pitching for inclusion on a list of Books Selected for School Libraries. Another recent book is the anthology, Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs From Michigan--which was a finalist for the 2000 ForeWord Magazine Anthology of the Year Award and for the 2000 Great Lakes Book Sellers Award.
I've taught writing and creative writing at Michigan State University for over twenty five years. From 1986-1992 I directed the Traverse Bay Writing Workshops, a national writing conference for English teachers; from 1989-1993,I was coordinator of the Michigan State University Overseas Writing Program. In the fall of 1998, I was awarded a National Writer's Voice/Writer's Community residency, and in the spring of 1999 I was the contest judge for the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction.
I have been a visiting writer at many colleges and universities, and have taught workshops at several international and national writer's conferences--
including The Paris Writer's Conference, the Stonecoast Writer's Conference in Maine, the Writing Your Self Conference in Santa Fe, The Cranbrook Retreat for Writers, the Goucher College MFA program and the Vermont College Post Graduate Writer's Conference, among others.
In addition, I've taught in the Vermont College low residency MFA program. Currently, I'm on the faculty of the Stonecoast/University of Southern Maine low residency MFA program.
I have a Ph.D. in American Literature from Michigan State University and a MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University.
Lately, I've been dividing my time between Lansing and Northport, Michigan, where I live with my wife Carole, a visual artist and museum docent.
