P E R S O N A L
Why anyone would want to know this stuff is beyond me--don't
you know that if you like a writer's work you should hope never to meet them in
person? More than once, I have admired a writer and then, upon meeting them,
discovered him or her to be a self-involved jerk with the personality of a
rabid weasel. But people keep asking--I guess for book
reports and stuff--so here's some miscellaneous personal info. I'll try to
be as brief as possible.
I was born in 1952 in Berkeley,
California, or so I am told. At the age of five, I moved to St. Louis Park,
Minnesota, where my parents continued to breed, eventually producing my four brothers and two sisters. I went to Cedar Manor Elementary
School (also the alma mater of Al Franken and the Coen brothers), and
eventually graduated honor-free from St. Louis Park High School. This is so
tedious. Why do you keep reading?
For the next eight years I
attended the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and the University of
Minnesota. Contrary to recent news reports, I did not graduate from either
institution. After college I worked various jobs for which I was ill-suited,
including sign painter, graphic artist, marketing executive, pineapple slicer,
etc. Eventually, having no better options, I decided to write a novel. I
finished writing Drawing Dead
in 1991. Two years later it was published by Simon & Schuster.
Today, I live with mystery writer and poet Mary Logue in Golden Valley, Minnesota and Stockholm,
Wisconsin. We have two small dogs (are you still reading?) named Rene and Jacques.
To the right is a picture of me
just after winning the National Book Award for Young People's Literature,
having my usual bad hair day, but an in-every-other-way-really-good day. As for
the photo above and to the left, the less said the better.
There you have it. Half a century
compressed into a few short paragraphs. Feel free to copy and paste for your
school project, but don't tell anybody I suggested it. Need to know more? Check
out my FAQs page, or go here for links to interviews.