Tom Spanbauer
| Tom Spanbauer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1946 Pocatello, Idaho, U.S. |
| Residence | Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Occupation | Author |
| Years active | 1989–present |
Tom Spanbauer is an American writer whose work often explores issues of sexuality, race, and the ties that bind disparate people together. Raised in Idaho, Spanbauer has lived in Kenya and across the United States. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches a course titled dangerous writing. He graduated in 1988 from Columbia University with an MFA in Fiction and has written five novels.
As a gay writer, he has explored issues of race and sexual identity, and has stated on his website that his work also addresses "how we make a family for ourselves in order to surmount the limitations of the families into which we are born." Spanbauer's childhood in Idaho influence his writing. He attended Idaho State University and Columbia. He also was a member of the Peace Corps in Kenya.
Spanbauer is the creator of the concept of dangerous writing, a technique he teaches with the philosophy outlined below:
Dangerous Writing focuses on a minimalistic style and “writing from the body,” the act of overcoming fear to write painful personal truths. According to Spanbauer, approximately forty of his students have published memoirs and novels.
Volume 1 of The Quarterly, published in the 1987 spring edition, featured Spanbauer's "Sea Animals."
Spanbauer’s novels are written in first person and connected to the author's personal life; in an interview with Judy Reeves for San Diego Writers, Ink, Spanbauer said
His novels The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Now is the Hour, and Faraway Places take place in his home state of Idaho. With In the City of Shy Hunters, Spanbauer breaks this pattern, setting much of the action in New York. His current novel I Loved You More hopscotches back and forth from Idaho to New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, all places where Spanbauer has lived and worked.
In Faraway Places, Spanbauer's first novel, young Jake Weber witnesses the murder of a Native American woman and is forced to reevaluate the community he was raised in. This coming of age story was hailed by A. M. Homes as "a family drama with a pitch perfect crescendo." The Los Angeles Times stated that "in his promising but uneven first novel, a coming-of-age story set in the early 50s, Tom Spanbauer writes convincingly as a teen-age boy bewildered by events that destroy his family's rural life."
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