67 Mixed Messages

Ed Allen

An extended bio from the author

 

I was born in New Haven Connecticut in 1948. I grew up mostly in the suburbs of New York, and received my B.A. in English from Goddard College in Vermont. At Goddard I enjoyed some success as a promising undergraduate poet, and later attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for one semester in 1972.

After spending some years bouncing around in various lousy but distinctly writerly jobs, such as taxi driver, butcher, and shipping clerk, I finally decided to get serious about writing. In 1984, I entered the graduate program in creative writing at Ohio University, where I began working on my first novel, a story based loosely on some of my Dickensian meat-business experiences. This novel, eventually to be published as Straight Through the Night, occupied most of my writing time while I was working toward my master’s degree.

After receiving my master’s degree in 1986, I continued on in the Ohio University Ph.D. program. In 1989, while I was still a Ph.D. student, Straight Through the Night was published by Soho Press. This novel attracted considerable attention, with reviews in such publications as The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and the Christian Science Monitor.

I received my Ph.D. in 1989, having completed as a creative dissertation a book of poems titled The Clean Place. My first academic position was as an assistant professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis. While teaching at Rhodes, I published three stories in The New Yorker, and also had stories taken by Story magazine and Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Southwest Review published a story called “River of Toys,” which went on to be chosen by Richard Ford for Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories, 1990.

In 1991, supported by the advance on my second novel, as well as by the proceeds from a three-day stint on Jeopardy!, I moved to Pahrump, Nevada (which I now think of as the Barking Dog Capital of America), where I spent a year living in the desert in a little double-wide trailer and writing full time. During that period I published stories in The New Yorker, Story, and Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Mustang Sally, my second novel, was published by W.W. Norton in 1992.

The following year I was appointed Creative Studies Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma, where I wrote and taught for two years. While in Oklahoma I published some more stories in Gentlemen’s Quarterly and The New Yorker, wrote some book reviews for The New York Times Book Review, and also began putting together a creative writing textbook called The Hands-On Fiction Workbook.

For the 1994-95 academic year, I was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to teach American literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. During my year in Krakow, I finished The Hands-On Fiction Workbook, which was published by Prentice-Hall in 1996. I returned to the United States in 1995 to join the faculty at San Jose State University, where I taught a mix of composition, literature, and creative writing classes, while struggling to keep my writing on track. In 1996 I accepted a position as associate professor of English at the University of South Dakota.

In 2002 my short story collection Ate It Anyway won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, a publication that came just in time to coincide with my application for tenure. I still get something of a chuckle when I look at the University of Georgia’s description of the award as being intended for the encouragement of “gifted young writers.” Since I was fifty-four when I received the award, I guess that makes me the oldest gifted young writer in America.

In 2003 my novel Mustang Sally was produced as a movie, under the title Easy Six. (I can be seen wandering around in the background in two scenes.) My most recent success has been the acceptance of my “hyperformal” sonnet collection 67 Mixed Messages by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. That book is scheduled to be published in the winter of 2005-2006.

I’ve lived in Vermillion, South Dakota for almost ten years now. By now, much of my east coast snobbery has melted away—except that I still wince when I hear otherwise educated people use the word lay when they mean lie. I’ve also discovered that when you have lived in a smaller town long enough, talking about whether it’s going to rain or not actually becomes interesting.