teague bohlen, writer
- Teague Bohlen
This is where I talk about myself, an ungainly thing at best. So bear with me.
Before I start, full disclosure. My first name rhymes with "beige" rather than "league." Yeah, I know it's non-intuitive, but hey, it was the late 60s. Besides, I was almost named "Alistair", so I figure that was one bullet dodged early on. (No offense to anyone out there named Alistair. Or you, Mom.)
I was born in Illinois, so it makes sense that my creative self got stuck there for a while. Most of my early fiction (as well as my first novel) is set there, and happily so—I had things to say about my homeland, this nation's heartland as well as my own, and I got to say them. I'm proud of that work, as it appeared in many small journals over the years, won the Martindale Prize for Fiction, got my novel nominated for the Pushcart Editors' Book Award and finally published in 2006 with Ghost Road Press.
But I moved from Illinois in my fifteenth year, and found myself in Tucson, Arizona, where Peanuts comic strips had filled my head with sand dunes and cacti. And that wasn't far from the truth, really, even if it did rain once in a while. Tucson became my second home, and I finished high school there, and stayed put for my undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona. I moved to Tempe for graduate school, and found at Arizona State University the sort of program that writers boast about, and rightfully so. Great faculty, promising peers, opportunity galore. I was far from Illinois at this point, in both time and distance, so it makes sense, too, that my fiction would eventually head out for the territories. My story Breathe it In was published in Terrain.org, and I worked at a dozen newspapers and magazines in my time in the Grand Canyon State.
Eventually, though, I'd move on from there too, to find myself in Denver, Colorado. A lot of that had to do with meeting my wife, who was from there and never wanted to leave in the first place. So I went with her, and have adopted Denver as my third home, a lovely place where I can enjoy seasons again, and don't have to shake my head to see the mercury rise into good tanning range on Christmas Day. I found a teaching gig at the University of Colorado at Denver that I honestly love, where I not only teach Creative Writing and Fiction but Magazine Writing as well; I also have the privilege of helping head up the creative staff of the literature and arts magazine Copper Nickel, and serve as faculty advisor for the UCD newspaper The Advocate. Somehow, I've still made the time to keep writing--to finish my novel The Pull of the Earth and get it published, and to work at a number of magazines and newspapers in Colorado as well. I don't know if I'll leave here--I've had two beautiful and brilliant daughters in the meantime, and I know how hard it is to take a girl away from Colorado. So maybe we'll stay.
In the meantime, I'm working on three projects at once--four, if you count freelancing articles here and there. One project is a book of short fiction set in and around central Illinois--my last burst of creative energy born back home, I suppose. The second is a comic-novel set in both Tucson and Denver tentatively titled Pizza Guy. And the third is another novel, this one just set in Tucson, which for now I'm calling Roll to Hit.
As I write this in the late summer of 2006, my novel The Pull of the Earth is on the verge of being released, and I'm looking forward to reading it wherever I can.
More to come as it unfolds.
Download my Academic Vita (MSWord) [coming soon]