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    • How writing a Memoir saved my marriage

  From the man himself:

  I grew up on the High Plains of Eastern Colorado, home to few trees, ample sagebrush, cowboys and wheat fields. The nearest airport or McDonalds was 164 miles away, but I was never bored. My family has owned the local newspaper in Burlington for five generations, and at nine years old I started working as (in my grandfather’s words) the “super sanitation engineer.” When I got older I started writing stories and taking pictures of everything from burned-down mobile homes to prize-winning sows at the Kit Carson County Fair.

  I was a weird kid. I didn’t play sports. I thought my parents were cool. I had a clown doll named Toody. In the second grade I tried to start an after-school coloring club, but it lasted just fifteen minutes; I had to kick everyone out because they weren’t coloring inside the lines well enough. I sometimes call myself “Mr. Fussy,” an alter-ego that makes his way into my essays and speeches. Mr. Fussy comes out when he sees someone toss a cigarette butt out the car window.

  My mother was the only feminist in Eastern Colorado, and early on she had us boycotting products that were endorsed by anyone who spoke out against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. I had to sneak Hawaiian Punch into the house because Donny and Marie Osmond, both anti-E.R.A Mormons, were the spokespeople for my favorite drink. (IRONY ALERT: I have a huge Mormon following; my book Househusband was nominated for book of the year in the Salt Lake City library system.) Some of my fiction features strong women, no doubt attributable to my mother’s influence.

  From Colorado, I studied art history and journalism at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and, after graduating, got my first job with the newspaper in Fort Myers, Florida. I was a lowly reporter when I met my wife Carol, the advertising director and a Kansas native. Eight years older than me and in management, she was forbidden fruit, but I was drawn to her and began to pursue in earnest. It did not take long for us to have a baby, Haley Joy, and our family began moving across the country like gypsies (Rochester, New York; St. Paul, Minnesota) as Carol trained for her dream job of newspaper publisher. I stayed home with our daughter, wrote freelance magazine articles and interested myself with cooking. I still have trouble walking by an unfamiliar grocery store without going in for a look.

  Carol landed her first publisher job in Macon, Georgia, and it was living in this beautiful, quirky city that first inspired me to write fiction. We’ve since returned to Fort Myers, where we live in a 1951 ranch-style home on the Caloosahatchee River. Carol is publisher of the paper where we met, and I’m still the primary caregiver of the family. I try to get my writing done while my daughter’s at school. Writing and housework complement each other well; one is brain-intensive, the other is brain-dead, and after struggling on a paragraph for twenty minutes, folding the white load provides a welcome respite.

   

  Strange but true Ad Facts

  I like to facebook and drink cocktails at the same time.

  When I am home alone with nothing to do, my default entertainment is watching Legally Blond.

  I am skeptical of Attention Deficit Disorder.

  I once underwent past-life regression therapy and discovered that I had lived as a woman during Roman times.

  I have never thrown nor received a punch. I have, however, been bitten in the face.

  I can’t watch violent movies because it makes me worry about the safety of my own family. Ergo: Legally Blond.

  I shower outside, on the patio. The neighbors don’t speak to me. They should stop trimming their hedge.

  I never let my gas gauge drop below a quarter-tank.

  I constantly battle my love affair with gin and Jack Daniels.

  I own three cowboy hats, five pair of boots (two of them “fancy”)

   

  My Favorites

  Curious people

  Target

  Indian food

  Home Depot

  National Lampoon’s Mr. Wong

  My F150 truck

  People-watching in airports

  The obscure novels published by the New York Review of Books

  Watching movies on the couch with Carol and Haley

  Canoeing

  South Park

  Museums of any kind

  Steamed clams

  Watching what people do in their cars when they’re at a stoplight

  Anything that involves a chainsaw

  Art by obscure regional artists

  Correcting other peoples’ unruly children

  Power-lifting

  Weekends in Key West with my wife (far too infrequent)

  Mangoes in July

  Cocktails at 5 o’clock (Okay, maybe 4 o’clock.)

  My cats, Mitchell and Tomas, who was found buried alive in a plastic trash bag when he was three weeks old. (This explains the appearance of the bizarre cat scene in my novel, Househusband)

  Working in the garden

  Cooking ethnic food

  Bookreporter.com

  Pine Island, Florida

  Birding

  Cruciferous vegetables – especially cabbage

  And my favorite books:

  How Green was my Valley by Richard Llewellyn

  The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

  Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

  Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag

  A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

  The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence

  Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham

  The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

  Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

  Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegardner

  I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward

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