Little Fred:  

Life Following my second or third departure from East Lansing in 1979, I trained as a chef in the Monterey Bay region of Northern California until 1984, when I returned to East Lansing to serve as R. Glenn Wright's assistant director for the 1984 Clarion Writer's Workshop in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Half my paycheck went to pay a long overdue MSU student tuition tab, which enabled me to at last pop loose my undergraduate transcript and enter the University of California--Santa Cruz, where I completed a B.A. in Literature/Creative Writing. Annie Gerard, who I had met at Clarion, trailed me across the country in a blue VW Vanagon full of doberman pinschers. Two years later, with one fewer dobie and a six-month old daughter, we came back east and enrolled in Columbia University's School of the Arts, where we each earned an M.F.A., fiction for her, non-fiction for me -- on the basis an excerpt from my dissertation ("Paradise with Misdirections: A Reconstructed Memoir") I was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1990. My association with Columbia continued in a variety of forms: ghostwriter for the Dean of the School of Journalism, student of Japanese language culture and religion, admissions administrator in the School of General Studies -- the undergraduate division of Columbia for "non-traditional" students, and Associate Director of the Donald Keene Center for Japanese Culture. Throughout this same period, I have also maintained regular ...Expand for more