George Foy

George Michelsen Foy (also known as Georges Foy and G.F. Michelsen) is a French-American novelist, essayist, and magazine journalist, and professor of creative writing. Born in New England in 1962, he has published a dozen novels since the late 1980s, half under his own name and several more under the nom de plume G.F. Michelsen. Until February 2010, the author kept secret the Michelsen persona’s real identity.

As a professor of creative writing at NYU, Foy/Michelsen earns his living in part by explaining fiction’s “rules” to his students; as a novelist, apparently, he knows how to break them. In an essay about literary theory (writing as Georges Michelsen), he notes that when he edited The Art and Practice of Explosion, the book seemed to him to come to a different conclusion from what he’d intended while writing it: specifically, a character he'd thought responsible for a secret betrayal turned out to be innocent. The novel had assumed, as the cliché has it, a will of its own.

The essay encapsulates Foy/Michelsen’s literary theory: “I hold a belief that every novel constitutes a story-world, built by the author in collaboration with the reader. . . . Much of the thrill of reading comes from the fact that a well made story-world . . . is as uncontrollable as Frankenstein’s creation. It’s an unguided missile, an independent tool. It will and must work in ways its author cannot control.”

Foy’s essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in Harper's Magazine,Rolling Stone, Poets & Writers, Men's Journal, and other first-tier publications; The Washington Square Review, Notre Dame Review and American Literary Review, among others, have published his short fiction. He has been teaching advanced creative writing at New York University since 1998.

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