John Vanderslice

I grew up literally in the woods; i.e., a rural Maryland community called Moyoane, a densely forested area populated by over-educated wannabe hippie (or survivalist) Washingtonians fleeing the city. I literally walked a mile to the bus stop every morning and a mile back in the afternoon. While I would not have claimed to love this when I was a kid, in fact it was invaluable time with which to exercise my imagination on all sorts of weird subjects. Now I wouldn't trade the experience for the world.

I grew up in a big Catholic family, the fifth of eight kids. I attended Catholic schools from 1st through 12th grade. This too was a highly formative experience and one about which I have surprisingly few complaints. It was not the worst education in the world, and experiencing religion as part of your day to day life, rather than only a Sunday thing, struck me then--as still does, even though I no longer practice as a Catholic--as fundamentally nourishing.

In the fall of 1979 I went off to the University of Virginia and majored in English, graduating in 1983. Following that I bounced around different addresses in the Washington DC metropolitan area, working a variety of unsatisfying jobs and eventually earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from George Mason University. At George Mason I met my future wife, Stephanie Vanderslice. Together we moved to Lafayette, Louisiana in 1993 to begin a doctoral program in English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. It was a fantastic four years: going to classes, making friends with other young writers, eating a lot of great Cajun food, going to Cajun music festivals, and witnessing the birth of our first son in 1996. The next year we both graduated and moved to Conway, Arkansas, where Stephanie had found a job at the University of Central Arkansas. I began as a part-time instructor at UCA, teaching freshman composition, but mostly I was a dad to our young son. Many years and promotions later, I am a full professor who teaches creative writing exclusively, both to undergraduates and to graduate students in the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. My wife, meanwhile, is also a full professor. And we have a second son!

My short stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have appeared in scores of literary journals, including Seattle Review, Versal, Sou'wester, Laurel Review, 1966, and Exquisite Corpse. I have also published fiction in several anthologies, including Redacted Story, Chick for a Day, The Best of the First Line: 2002-2006, and Tartts: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Authors. Island Fog (Lavender Ink), my collection of linked short stories all set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, was met with universally positive reviews and was named by Library Journal as one of the Top 15 Indie Fiction Titles of 2014. My historical novel, The Last Days of Oscar Wilde, a long-considered labor of love, was published by Burlesque Press in January, 2018. My new novel, which will be officially released by Braddock Avenue Books in October 2021, is called Nous Nous. I blog about the writing life and the teaching writing life on my blog Payperazzi (payperazzi.blogspot.com).