|
Week of Apr 13 | Christopher Coake Christopher Coake is a new type of interview for the show. Chris is at the beginning of what I believe will be a long and successful writing career. He grew up
in Indiana, where he received his
undergraduate degree from Ball State University. At that time he
thought he would be a high school English teacher. But he had been
bitten by the writing bug, and realized teaching high school
students and writing his own fiction would be difficult to do. So he went
to Miami University of Ohio, where he received an MA in creative
writing and began to
develop his writing style at a higher level. Chris went through some
changes in his personal life after leaving Miami, and decided to
enroll in the MFA program at The Ohio State University. His
breakout story, ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE, was published in the Gettysburg
Review and was included in the BEST
AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF 2004. Chris has
a collection of stories, WE'RE
IN TROUBLE, that has just been published by Harcourt Brace.
I have read the stories and continue to be impressed with the quality
and style of
Chris's writing. WE'RE IN TROUBLE will also be published in England,
Germany, and
France. In January
of 2005 Chris and his fiancé, Stephanie Lauer, moved to Reno, Nevada,
where Chris works as an assistant professor of English at the
University of Nevada. Nick
Hornby, the author of HIGH
FIDELITY and other wonderful novels, wrote, "I would
like to
claim that I discovered him, but you can't really discover writers
like this; the quality of the work is so blindingly obvious that he
was never going to labor in obscurity for any length of time...
Sometimes when you're reading the stories, you forget to breathe...
They're beautifully
written, and they have the bottom, but they're never dull and they all
contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas." Otto
Penzler wrote, "I've read more than a thousand stories a
year for the past eight years and
nothing-nothing- has surpassed the work of Mr. Coake. You will be
stunned, you will have
tears in your eyes, and you will remember these stories the rest of
your life." So please
sit back and listen to Chris and I talk about his development as a
writer. I think you'll
find it fascinating.
|
Please if you would like to run your ad here. |
||||||||||||||
