PAUL MICHEL

I was born in northeast Philadelphia in 1957, a neighborhood of row houses and corner stores. I was the youngest of five siblings in a family of voracious readers, so I was devouring Classic Comics and the backs of cereal boxes well before first grade. We moved to Ohio when I was five, to Westerville, a college and farming town just north of Columbus. I attended a tiny Catholic school where pink-cheeked nuns in floor-length habits glided silently across the linoleum, alarming us with their apparent lack of feet. I began playing mandolin when I was eight, and guitar when I was ten. As a young reader I was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard Pyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens and Homer. I managed two years at a parochial high school before transferring to a chaotic, over-crowded public institution where I both enjoyed and endured virtual anonymity and grew my hair long enough to tuck into my shirt pocket. When I was 17 I took up the fiddle, alienating most everyone within earshot. I wrote a couple of stories about that time, and some silly songs, but mostly played tunes and read a lot.

I went to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio from 1975-1979. Despite its reputation as a literary powerhouse I managed not to write at all there, instead majoring in Anthropology and playing fiddle in a faculty bluegrass band. After graduation I lived in the west of Ireland for a year, studying traditional music on a T.J. Watson Fellowship. Upon my return to the States I interned for a while at the Library of Congress, then moved to Seattle in 1981 with my future wife Ann, a fellow Kenyon alumnus. We married in 1984 and have two sons, Colin and Pete. We live near Greenlake north of downtown, in a house with two ponds, a vegetable garden and a flying poodle named Geoffrey. I still play the fiddle, and the mandolin and guitar, and write songs, and perform now and then at various Northwest venues.

After a few false starts, I started writing fiction seriously in the early 1990s. In 1996 I enrolled in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. I received my degree in 1998. I wrote exclusively short stories for the next several years, and was fortunate to have some published in literary journals, and even to win a few awards. Late in 2002 I stumbled across on on-line article about a man who dug a mine in Los Angeles in the 1930s to find a treasure buried by an ancient Hopi tribe of Lizard People. Almost immediately I began researching and sketching out the characters I imagined might have been involved in such a marvelous caper. I finished a first draft of "Houdini Pie" in 2006, and it's been through a couple of big revisions since. Bennett & Hastings agreed to take the novel on in 2009.

I'm working now on a novel called "The Gem of Egypt," about both an 1860s murder and the tragedy of 1970s strip mining in Eastern Ohio. I continue to write some short fiction as well, and to play and perform music whenever I get the chance.