Lee Patton

After growing up in an immigrant-lumbering-fishing town on California's Mendocino coast, and after college in Sacramento and San Francisco, I headed to Colorado to teach high school and work on my M.A. in Denver University's Writing Program. I still enjoy Denver's mellow city life, exploring the Rocky Mountains and the redrock canyons of western Colorado and southern Utah.

In the late 80's I found myself inspired to write plays for Denver's legendary Changing Scene, dedicated only to new work and artistic collaboration. That led me to develop plays in Denver, as well as Arizona, New Hampshire, Oregon, Alaska, then Off-off Broadway in New York. Among my favorite experiences was hurrying to the theatre to catch my first produced play, TORTURE: AN INTERROGATIVE COMEDY, after long travels--stunned by the inspired performances, lights, music, costumes, and even good reviews.

A scholarship sent me to London to study theatre, where a jealous-love murder threat in our dorm inspired the fictionalized events of my first novel, NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY, Alyson Books, 2000 (which I published as Casey Nelson to avoid embarrassing my fellow students and teachers in the U.K.). In the second novel, LOVE AND GENETIC WEAPONRY: THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE, I explored a completely fictitious Hitchcockian-paranoid-romance set among very real Western landscapes.

The idea of the amateur sleuth fascinated me, especially the role of my protagonist, Ray O'Brien, a young teacher forced into the role of accidental detective when the danger grows intimate among his friends and prospective heartthrobs. He must solve the mystery and defuse the danger using only his everyday wits and evolving insights into human nature.

Like my character, I have found myself in the midst of a role I never predicted--accidental mystery writer. But I'm at work on the third novel in the series, FRESH GRAVE IN GRAND CANYON, which gives me a chance to explore more of what I love--whitewater rafting and the canyon's surreal geology--and develop another romance interrupted, of course, by murder.

My two most recent novels, MY AIM IS TRUE and EVERY SUMMER DAY, explore family bonds and coming of age--the first at the turn of seventeen to eighteen, the second at the turn of twenty-nine to thirty.

I'm also embarked on a long-term creative nonfiction project in collaboration with journalist Kristen Hannum, an exploration of the American South and Southern identity. The first chapter, "Hysterical Storms, All-American Terror, and Happy Hour at Applebee's" is forthcoming in Crosstimbers, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma's literary journal. The third chapter,"Howling Grounds and Scorched Earth," in Under the Sun, which was cited as Notable in Best Essays 2015.

Please visit my website for more info and links: lee-patton.com

I always enjoy hearing from readers. Please contact me at lee_patton@hotmail.com.