Elliott, Stephen 1971-

PERSONAL:

Born 1971; son of Neil Elliott (a writer and real estate developer). Education: University of Illinois, B.A.; Northwestern University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA. Office—Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-2087. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Stanford University, San Francisco, CA, Marshall McCall Lecturer. Has worked as a cabdriver, stripper, bartender, and marketing executive.

MEMBER:

Writer's Grotto, San Francisco, CA, Progressive Reading Series, founder.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James L. Rainey Award for fiction, 1994; Stegner Fellowship, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Jones Inn, Boneyard Press (Granada Hills, CA), 1998.

A Life without Consequences (novel), McAdam/Cage (San Francisco, CA), 2001.

What It Means to Love You (novel), McAdam/Cage (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

(Editor) Politically Inspired: An Anthology of Fiction for Our Time (short stories), McAdam/Cage (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Happy Baby (novel), McAdam/Cage (San Francisco, CA), 2004.

Looking Forward to It: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process, Picador (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor, with others) Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction (short stories), MacAdam/Cage (San Francisco, CA), 2005.

My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (short stories), Cleis Press (San Francisco, CA), 2006.

Contributor to anthologies, including Best American Non-Required Reading, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. Contributor of short stories and essays to periodicals, including Sun magazine, the New York Times, Esquire, and GQ.

SIDELIGHTS:

After running away from an abusive father at the age of thirteen, author Stephen Elliott spent his adolescent days roaming the streets of Chicago and his nights sleeping on the rooftop of a local convenience store. When hunger got the best of him, he foraged for food in garbage cans. When the weather became too much to bear, he covered himself with cardboard boxes and huddled in corners. After about a year of surviving both depression and these conditions, he was found in a hallway, wrists slashed with a tin can. Becoming a ward of the state, he started life anew in a series of group homes and state-funded institutions.

If this sounds like the stuff of novels, it is, and the novel is Elliott's A Life without Consequences. Elliott told Windy City Times interviewer Gregg Shapiro: "[It's] the most autobiographical thing I've ever written." He continued: "There's fiction in there. I created characters to further the story. But the places … are very real." The novel, Elliott's second, is the fictionalized telling of his own experiences in Chicago's child welfare system. As he told Shapiro: "These are the places where I spent my youth…. There are something like sixty thousand children out there living in these kinds of places…. The purpose of this book, really, is to raise awareness."

The novel revolves around fourteen-year-old Paul, a motherless teen who leaves home after being chained to a radiator by his menacing father. After a failed suicide attempt, Paul is picked up by police and taken to a mental institution where he meets other teens like himself. He finds solace and companionship in these characters: French Fry, whose attempt to immolate himself left him horribly disfigured; pill-popping Mike; and Jay, the pyromaniac who set fire to a church. He also meets Tanya, in whom he senses a kindred spirit, and the two escape their captivity together. They set up "home" in a tool shed, but the police find them and forcibly remove Tanya.

Taken to yet another group home, in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes housing project, Paul makes new friends while searching for the old ones. He is also offered an irresistible deal by the home administrator: if he earns straight As in the system's school, he will be permitted to attend public high school. This is where the reader is allowed a glimpse into Paul's intelligence, as he realizes this is his one shot at breaking the cycle in which he is trapped. Paul takes the offer and finds himself at the local high school, where he dates a cheerleader from a wealthy family. Though he and Jessica date for a long time, it is Tanya he truly loves. Paul acknowledges this when he tells Jessica: "You don't need me. You're already complete. I need someone who is not complete because I am not complete."

The remainder of the novel is a retelling of Paul's, and Elliott's, eventual triumph over adversity. Elliott explained to Teenreads Web site critic Serena Burns: "It's bleak but it's also full of hope…. There are some happy endings, even in the most horrible of circumstances. I want people to walk away knowing what a group home is. And I want children to walk away knowing that they can make good decisions, which will affect their life significantly."

Perhaps it should have been obvious that Elliott was destined for a career as a writer. At the age of ten, his bedroom floor was covered with poetry. In group homes, he would write rap lyrics for the bigger kids as a way to pass the time. Still, he never set out to be a writer. Before selling the manuscript for A Life without Consequences, Elliott had difficulty holding down a steady job. "I would be on the job and I would be writing and I'd lose various jobs. I just kept writing," he joked with Shapiro. "I have like eight or nine books that I've written. Now I get a fellowship from Stanford, so now I'm a writer."

Winning the Stegner Fellowship came as a surprise and a thrill to Elliott. In an interview with SFWeekly online writer Mark Athitakis, he explained how it happened. It was "something I put in the mail and just forgot. You send a piece of paper and something you've written. Thousands of people apply for this, it's ridiculous." In a journey that has taken him from mental institutions to Stanford University, Elliott now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, writing and also teaching creative writing.

His first published novel, the street-tough Jones Inn, recounts the period in his life that he spent in the group home school and in the local high school, a version of the same event that is included in A Life without Consequences. "I wrote it for my friends," he admitted to interviewer Kevin Davis of the Network Chicago Web site, "just to impress them."

Elliott's third novel is What It Means to Love You. It revolves around two main characters who work as strippers in the gay bars of Chicago. Elliott described the book in the Windy City Times: "It explores the motivation behind people that are strippers…. A lot of them, maybe not most, but a reasonable percentage are doing it for emotional reasons. They're looking for something else and it's not money." Again, the novel is semi-autobiographical; over the years, Elliott held such odd jobs as stripper, cabdriver, and bartender. When Gregg Shapiro asked Elliott about his plans for the future, Elliott laughingly replied: "I love San Francisco. I'm not going to leave Stanford until I have to."

In Happy Baby, Elliott once again mines the hardships of his childhood and young adulthood as he tells the story of Theo, a thirty-something Chicagoan who was so badly abused in his youth—raped by a case worker at the age of twelve, and thrown into the a series of juvenile detention centers—that he seeks affection and pleasure through pain as a grown man. Elliott shows the development of Theo's dysfunctional outlook by flashing back through his various relationships, and illustrating how Theo came to allow various tortures to be committed upon him, as he was unable to fight back, first physically and then emotionally. Allison Block, in a review for Booklist, commented that "this compelling confessional reveals a ravaged soul seeking solace and resolution in the wake of unspeakable crimes." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book "grimly deterministic, but intermittently powerful," despite the fact that "it's hard for a passive protagonist to stir interest." Writing for the Antioch Review, Kyle Minor observed: "Elliott is unflinching in his depictions of the erotic acts, the tools of torture and the psychology of pain. But his real interest is in the psychology of debasement."

My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is a collection of linked stories, again semi-autobiographical, that trace the experiences of the narrator from Chicago to San Francisco as he experiments with drugs and then bondage and sadomasochism. Although the character is successful in finding women to dominate him, the relationships ultimately fail, and he is left unfulfilled. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked upon "descriptions of sex that walk a fine line between the clinical and the sensational," and concluded that "the narrator's callowness undercuts the sophistication of his topic," while a Publishers Weekly reviewer opined that "the stories all tend to blur together in a sexual vacuum."

Not all of Elliott's writing is autobiographical in nature, as he exhibits with a number of politically-related books. He has served as editor for two volumes of political short stories, Politically Inspired: An Anthology of Fiction for Our Time and Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction. The first book collected twenty-nine previously unpublished works focusing on the political climate after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and combined both well-known and up-and-coming authors. A Publishers Weekly critic remarked that "as an exercise in subversive fiction, this is an interesting if spotty experiment," while a writer for Kirkus Reviews pronounced the book "a superb collection, without a single dud." Proceeds from the book went to support Oxfam America. The second volume repeated the basic premise of the first—though with the additional subject matter of the 2004 U.S. presidential election to fuel the prose—offering a new selection of mostly-unpublished fiction by a range of authors. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: "The anger and hope are leavened by a healthy and much-needed dose of sarcasm." Proceeds from this volume went to leftist political candidates in the 2006 elections.

Elliott rounds out his political writings with Looking Forward to It: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process, his own personal coverage of the 2004 presidential elections, tracking the Democrats all the way through the primaries and the Democratic National Convention. Alan Moores, writing for Booklist, called the book "a fresh, ground-level read on the candidates, the media coverage, and the election process itself."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, winter, 2005, Kyle Minor, review of Happy Baby, p. 189.

Booklist, August, 2001, John Green, review of A Life without Consequences, p. 2085; January 1, 2004, Allison Block, review of Happy Baby, p. 820; November 15, 2004, Alan Moores, review of Looking Forward to It: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Electoral Process, p. 536.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2001, review of A Life without Consequences, p. 1313; August 15, 2002, review of What It Means to Love You, p. 1161; September 1, 2003, review of Politically Inspired: An Anthology of Fiction for Our Time, p. 1090; December 15, 2003, review of Happy Baby, p. 1411; August 1, 2006, review of My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, p. 740.

Library Journal, October 1, 2001, David A. Barona, review of A Life without Consequences, p. 139.

Publishers Weekly, September 30, 2002, review of What It Means to Love You, p. 139; October 6, 2003, review of Politically Inspired, p. 63; November 7, 2005, review of Stumbling and Raging, p. 53; August 28, 2006, review of My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, p. 28.

School Library Journal, May, 2002, Julie Dasso, review of A Life without Consequences, p. 179.

ONLINE

American Statesman,http://www.nowhere500.com/ (December 23, 2001), Laura Anderson, "Fiction Nears Truth in ‘Consequences.’"

Green Bay Press-Gazette,http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/ (October 21, 2001), Jean Peerenboom, "Author's Tale of Life on the Chicago Streets Is Riveting."

Network Chicago,http://www.networkchicago.com/ (March 7, 2002), Kevin Davis, "Coming in from the Cold."

SFWeekly,http://www.sfweekly.com/ (August 8, 2001), Mark Athitakis, "The Making of Stephen Elliott."

Stephen Elliot Home Page,http://www.stephenelliott.com (October 14, 2003).

Teenreads,http://www.teenreads.com/ (January 10, 2002), Serena Burns, "Author Profile: Stephen Elliott."

Windy City Times,http://www.outlineschicago.com/ (September 26, 2001), Gregg Shapiro, "Truth and Consequences: An Interview with Author Stephen Elliott."