About Tom
A Life in Aphorisms
You must swim sideways to escape a riptide. This is one thing my family learned from spending summers on the beach at Camp Pendleton, a spot known for its dangerous tides. I'm the oldest of twenty-six cousins, so swimming sideways also meant telling fibs to our mothers and aunts when we promised not to go in the waves past our kneecaps. It meant when we returned from exploring the magical place where the estuary met the sea—a rich lagoon holding sting rays, angry crabs, living sand dollars, and other treasures of the deep—we kept the best stories to ourselves. You must swim sideways to escape the rip, or the tide's relentless pull will take you out to sea.
A man is measured by the obstacles he overcomes. While training to become an Air Force pilot, my father failed his first check ride badly. Afterwards, he reported to his C.O. and remembered glimpsing this phrase hanging over the man's head and my father's shame turned to hope. He would go on to become an F-4 Phantom pilot, but he never forgot that moment and neither have I. Our failures teach and shape us into better human beings.
Our family lived everywhere from Lubbock, Texas to Stuttgart Air Force Base in Germany. I learned to love travel and love the stories of these places, their history and lore. These loves would serve me well when it came time to write a novel.
You measure twice, but cut only once. I was told this before marrying my wife, an ELCA pastor raised on the prairies of Minnesota. We met while I was teaching seventh grade English in southern California. After we were married, I happened upon a children's book about pioneer times that touched on the Dakota Conflict and the mass hangings in Mankato. The scope of the bloodshed staggered me. Growing up outside the Midwest, I had never heard of this pivotal historical event, so often overshadowed by the Civil War.
The book triggered my imagination. Here was a story for the ages, a story of friendship gone wrong, a story of all the things the people of two disparate cultures did to survive a summer of starvation and war. The congregation where my wife accepted her first call was a mere five miles from the Lower Sioux Agency, which was burned to ground in 1862. I felt this story calling to me, a wound of time and I knew I had to tell it. I measured my way through many drafts before finding the right cut to guide my narrative.
God is in the details, but so is the devil. This aphorism comes courtesy of Ted Kooser. There's this borderland where research and the imagination intersect, and it's an electric place where I lived during the four years I wrote The Night Birds. History provided the skeleton and then my imagination provided the blood and skin, the quickening. I trained under Terry Davis and Roger Sheffer at the MFA program in MSU, Mankato. They taught me a love of the authentic details, their power to place the reader in a narrative that touches other lives.
"The highest thing we can do," Terry once said in a workshop, "is write something that has a physical impact on a reader. If we write so that a reader laughs out loud, feels a shudder travel down their spine or a rush of emotion that makes them cry, then we have done our work as storytellers." This is my ultimate hope for my novel, The Night Birds. I hope through details that people see that history is alive and capable of touching us here in the present.
It's advice that I make sure to repeat to my own students here at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, Wisconsin where I teach literature and creative writing.
Never second guess a blessing. This is the aphorism I am living today. I've been blessed as a teacher, as a pastor's husband and a father of a two year old named Tess. It's a blessing that my novel found a great publisher in Soho Press and an editor like Laura Hruska willing to take a chance on my book. It's a blessing that novel is going to become a BookSense pick for August and a Midwest Connections pick. The STARRED review from Publisher's Weekly and the enthusiastic response from readers exceed my wildest imaginings.
All these things are a blessing, and so I pray such blessings find you, too.
"Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness."
--Excerpt from: "A Blessing" by James Wright
One final thing—since writing this I've come across many clever aphorisms I wished I had written or known earlier. Here are a few:
Life's like Sanskrit read to a Pony. Lou Reed
Hawks may soar, but chipmunks don't get sucked into jet engines. Joseph Finder
Never give a gun to ducks. B Kliban
Interviews
A Few of My Favorite Things:
Books on Writing
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
The Art of Fiction, John Gardner
The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo
Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser
Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
Novels
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
Dune, Frank Herbert
The King Must Die, Mary Renault
Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech
Staggerford, Jon Hassler
Giants in the Earth, O.E. Rolvaag
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grendel, John Gardner
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Wicked, Gregory Maguire
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Vision Quest, Terry Davis
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K LeGuin
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
Plainsong, Kent Haruf
Short Fiction
Erratics, Roger Hart
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Light at the Crossing, Kent Meyers
The Best Stories of Anton Chekov
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
Graveyard of the Atlantic, Alyson Hagy
Music of the Inner Lakes, Roger Sheffer
Anything by Alice Munro
Nonfiction
The Summer of Ordinary Ways, Nicole Helget
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie
Population 485, Michael Perry
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
Poets and Favorite Poems
Dylan Thomas "Fern Hill"
Nance Van Winckel "Bad Girl with Hawk"
Rainer Maria Rilke "For the Sake of a Single Poem"
Mary Oliver "In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl"
Tony Hoagland "Self Improvement"
Richard Robbins "Famous Persons We Have Known"
Ted Kooser "Pearl"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Sonnet XXII"
Gwen Hart "Anniversary"
Shel Silverstein "They've put a Brassiere on the Camel"
William Butler Yeats "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"
Richard Wilbur "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"
Sharon Olds "Size and Sheer Will"
Stephen Dobyns "Black Dog, Red Dog"
Li-Young Lee "The Gift"
W.S. Merwin "For the Anniversary of my Death"
ee cummings "somewhere I have never traveled gladly beyond"
Elizabeth Bishop "The Moose"
James Wright "A Blessing"