I have a bachelor’s degree in business and a master’s degree in English, both from Colorado State University. I won the CSU fiction-writing contest two years in succession, and used the prize money to buy new shoes. I taught writing, literature and the history of cinema at Genesee Community College in Batavia, New York for three years (and also at our branch campus inside nearby Attica State Prison). During my brief teaching career I wrote a short story titled “Cache La Poudre” which was published by Little, Brown in a book containing stories by Phillip Roth and Erica Jong. I left teaching and went into business, but I never stopped writing. I wrote play and film reviews while living in Great Falls, Montana. Later, as a Senior Fellow at Denver’s Center for the New West and while working for the State of Nebraska, I regularly published articles about applications of the Internet in rural economic development. And I authored and delivered countless speeches on that subject across the US and Australia. US West and SCORE sponsored nationally distributed videos about my work as a “digital pioneer.”
I currently write crime fiction and, when the mood comes over me, tongue-in-cheek short stories. I have finished a novel called “Club Red” about a feisty old lady who believes she knows the real story behind the JFK assassination, but gets tangled up in nearly calamitous political intrigue when she decides to make a few dollars by sharing what she knows with the world. And I’m outlining a mainstream novel about a stranger who jumps to his death from a building in an obscure little village and has a huge impact (pardon the pun) on almost everybody who lives there.
I am president of Citizens Water Advocacy Group, vice chair of the mayor’s economic development advisory committee, and librarian for the Professional Writers of Prescott. I chaired the first Urban Wildlife Symposium in Prescott in 2005 and assisted with the second one in 2007. And I am a guest curator at Sharlot Hall Museum, helping to write the captions and select the images for a 2008 exhibit on the story of water in the West. As all fiction writers know, it’s fun to create imaginary worlds, but it’s real-life stuff that provides authentic material for those stories. I hope my friends don’t mind that I sometimes put their personalities into characters in my stories. Or, if I need a particular kind of cadaver… their bodies.
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Copyright © 2007
Illustrations Copyright © 2007 by Walt Anderson