Grimsley, Jim 1955-

views updated

Grimsley, Jim 1955-

PERSONAL:

Born September 21, 1955, in Edgecombe County, NC; son of Jasper Melton Grimsley and Mary Elizabeth Hotaling. Education: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, B.A., 1978. Politics: "None." Religion: "None."

ADDRESSES:

Home—Atlanta, GA. Office—Creative Writing Program, Emory University, N 303 B Callaway Center, 537 Kilgo Cir., Atlanta, GA 30322. Agent—Peter Hagan, The Gersh Agency New York, 130 W. 42nd St., Ste. 2400, New York, NY 10036. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and playwright. Emory University, Atlanta, GA, senior writer-in-residence and director of the Creative Writing Program; Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, playwright in residence, 1986—. Founding member of ACME Theatre Co., 1983-87; chairman of Regional Organization of Theatres—South (ROOTS), 1990-91; About Face Theatre, Chicago, IL, playwright in residence, 1999-2004.

MEMBER:

Southeast Playwrights Project (member of board of directors, 1989—), PEN, Alternate Roots.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Jesse Rehder Prize for Fiction from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1977; winner of Southeast Playwriting Contest, 1986, and George Oppenheimer Award from Newsday, 1988, both for Mr. Universe; grants from City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs and Georgia Council for the Arts, both 1987, and Fulton County Arts Council, 1988, all for White People; Rockefeller grants, 1988, for Anti-Gravity, and 1990, for The Lizard of Tarsus; grant from Georgia Council for the Arts, 1990, and third prize from New Orleans Contemporary Art Center Playwrights Competition, 1991, both for Belle Ives; grant from City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs, 1992, for Second Hand in Motion; award from Rockefeller Playwriting Commission, 1993, for The Decline and Fall of the Rest; Bryan Prize for Drama from Fellowship of Southern Writers, 1993; Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award finalist, 1995, for Winter Birds; Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1995; Prix Charles Brisset, 1995; Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writer's Award, 1997; National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant from Theatre Communications Group/Pew Charitable Trust, 1999-2004; Lambda Literary Award for Horror/Science Fiction/Fantasy, 2001, for Kirith Kirin; Gay and Lesbian Bisexual Task Force (GLBTF) Award for Fiction, American Library Association; Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2005.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Winter Birds, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1994, originally published in German translation as Wintervogel, Zebra (Germany), 1992.

Dream Boy, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1995.

My Drowning, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1997.

Comfort and Joy, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1999.

Kirith Kirin, Meisha Merlin (Atlanta, GA), 2000.

Boulevard, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

The Ordinary, Tor Books (New York, NY), 2004.

The Last Green Tree, Tor (New York, NY), 2006.

Forgiveness, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2007.

Work has been anthologized in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 16; Men on Men 4; Men on Men 2000; and Best Stories from the South, 2001.

PLAYS

The Existentialists, produced at the ACME Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1983.

The Earthlings, produced at Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1984.

The Receptionist in Hell, produced at the Nexus Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1985.

Estelle and Otto, produced at the ACME/Nexus Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1985.

Dead of Winter, produced at the Nexus Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1986; adapted for radio as Beam Angel, by Berl Boykin, National Public Radio, 1993.

On the Appearance of a Fire in the West, produced at the Nexus Theatre, 1987.

Mr. Universe (also see below), produced at the Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1987; produced Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theatre, New York, NY, 1988.

Math and Aftermath, produced at the Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1988.

Man with a Gun, produced at the Nexus Theatre/ SAME, Atlanta, GA, 1989.

White People, produced at the Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1989.

The Lizard of Tarsus, produced at the Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1990.

The Fall of the House of Usher (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's short story), produced at the Theatrical Outfit, Atlanta, GA, 1991.

Belle Ives, produced at the Seven States Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 1991.

Aurora Be Mine, produced at the Seven Stages Theatre, Short Play Festival, Atlanta, GA, 1992.

The Borderland, produced Off-Off-Broadway at the Currican Theatre, New York, 1994.

Mr. Universe and Other Plays, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1998.

Fascination produced in Waterford, CT, at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, 2002.

PERFORMANCE PIECES

Stop and Think, performed by Celeste Miller in Los Angeles, CA, Tampa, FL, Washington, DC, and Atlanta, GA, as part of her touring repertoire, 1987-88.

Anti-Gravity, performed by Celeste Miller in Miami, FL, at the New Music America Festival, 1988.

Eating the Green Monkey, performed by the author in Los Angeles, CA, at Highways, 1989.

Shelter, performed by the author at Writers in Concert, 14th Street Playhouse, 1991.

Walk through Birdland, performed by the author and Celeste Miller in Tales from the Heartland, produced in Atlanta, GA, at the Seven Stages Theatre, 1992.

The Masturbator, performed by the author in Tales from the Heartland, produced in Atlanta, GA, at the Seven Stages Theatre, 1992.

Memo to the Assassin, performed by Celeste Miller in Tales from the Heartland, produced in Atlanta, GA, at the Seven Stages Theatre, 1992.

Contributor to periodicals, including Amethyst, Carolina Quarterly, Catalyst, Cellar Door, Double Take, Irregardless, Men's Style, New Orleans Review, Open City, Southern Exposure, and Yackety Yack. Works have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew, and Japanese.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jim Grimsley once told CA: "Though I never wanted to be anything but a writer of books, I found the path so difficult, consuming more than twenty years, that I had all but given up when I secured a German publisher for my first novel. My first book was published in Germany and France before being published in the United States. The only aspect of my writing career that has not been accidental is the writing itself: I have pursued it like a craft. But the fact that I have found a producer for my plays and publisher for my novels is the result of a process of sidewise connections that make no sense when I look back on them. It is a lesson, I think, in planning, and has taught me to trust intuition as another kind of tool for living. I could never have consciously chosen the road that has unfolded. I am very grateful for that."

As a playwright and novelist, Grimsley produces dark, witty works that explore such issues as family, religion, and homosexuality. Writing novels had always been Grimsley's great ambition, but he created more than a dozen plays before his first novel was finally published in 1994. Some of his dramas are collected in Mr. Universe and Other Plays. His scenarios are quite diverse, including the tale of a pornographic movie filmed on Bikini Atoll on the eve of the first hydrogen bomb detonation; an imprisoned Jesus being interrogated by the apostle Paul at the time of the Second Coming; and a bodybuilder's rescue by two drag queens. Nelson Taylor, a reviewer for Bomb, found that Grimsley makes "no apologies for being tough," and noted that "his powers are dialogue and description, which are always free of judgement." Taylor went on to comment: "Each play presents an often surreal but searing allegory for the tepid and shallow flow of status quo America."

In the novel Dream Boy, Grimsley creates an unusual story about first love, with two teenaged boys as the protagonists. Nathan, a bookish lad who moves to the country with his parents, finds himself attracted to his neighbor Roy, an outgoing farm boy. Their deepening feelings for each other and the consummation of their love is described in an intense but dreamlike style, as are the more horrifying scenes of Nathan's sexual abuse by his alcoholic father and his rape in a deserted cabin. According to Charles Harmon in Booklist: "This very unusual novel is a truly unique addition to gay literature."

In My Drowning, Grimsley presents the reminiscences of Ellen Tote, an elderly woman who grew up destitute in rural North Carolina. Overworked, underfed, and physically abused, Ellen eventually escapes to a better life, but she cannot get away from a recurring dream about her mother walking into a river and then throwing Ellen into the waters. "The gradual sorting-out of her childhood that the dream engenders is as credible and rich as the world that contains it," declared a Kirkus Reviews writer, who added that the novel is "moving, vivid, and very real: a work of tremendous, quiet intensity." Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor complained of a "dispiriting tawdriness" in the book, but added that it ends "on a more positive note of survival and reconciliation" and is, "behind the plain prose, an intriguing work." Concluded Edward Hower in the New York Times Book Review: "Ellen is an appealing narrator, and … recollections of stolen moments of love provide welcome relief from the viciousness all around her. They also provide occasions for some lyrical prose amid Mr. Grimsley's powerful and painfully detailed descriptions."

In Comfort and Joy, Grimsley presents a gay love story that follows a common scenario found in heterosexual love stories: two people from extremely different socioeconomic classes fall in love. Dr. Ford McKinney is a southern aristocrat and his partner, Dan Crell, is from a lower-middle-class background. When the men visit both their families at Christmas, one meeting turns out fine but the other is disastrous. Theodore R. Salvadori noted that the author "tells a story of relationships and the power we have over each other." Booklist contributor Brad Hooper commented that the story is "sincere and never melodramatic nor maudlin."

The author turns to fantasy with his novel Kirith Kirin, which tells the story of a young farm boy who decides to help King Kirith Kirin reclaim his rightful throne, which has been taken over by the Blue Queen. The young boy turns out to have magical powers, which he uses to help save the world. In a review for the Library Journal, Jackie Cassada called the novel "an elegant tale of love, war, and magic."

Boulevard takes place in 1978 New Orleans, where young, handsome Newell from rural Alabama comes to find his way in the world. Hanging out on Bourbon Street, he soon discovers that he is attracted to the gay community and the seamier side of New Orleans life, including drugs. A Kirkus Reviews contributor especially liked the character of "the aging transsexual Clarence/Miss Sophia, a minor figure but one rendered with superb delicacy." T.R. Salvadori, writing in the Library Journal, noted that "Grimsley has created remarkably real characters and a New Orleans setting readers can almost smell."

Grimsley's The Ordinary is another fantasy novel, this time focusing on the Twil Gate that connects two worlds and a translator named Jedda, who is from the world of Senal and finds herself part of a delegation to Irion. Jedda is attracted to Irion and the people in it and eventually is transported back in time to meet the creator of the Twil Gate, which starts her on a new path "in which perceptions of who she is, her place in the world, and the world itself are drastically challenged," as noted by Paula Luedtke in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the author "has the necessary world-building skills to shine brightly." Writing in the Lambda Book Report, Steve Berman commented: "The most interesting aspect of the book, and one that Grimsley should be commended for, is that he does involve several of his characters in the search for higher meaning."

The Last Green Tree follows The Ordinary and takes place on Aramen, a land torn in civil war. Wealthy merchant Fineas Figg is bitter after the Mage redistributes wealth evenly among the inhabitants, but his top priority is looking after ten-year-old Keely Files. Keely is a traumatized youth but may hold the key to stopping Rao and his army of mantis-like creatures who are pursuing genocidal ambitions. They are aided in their quest by former rebel Kirta Poth and a powerful priest, Dekkar. Reviews for the fantasy novel were mostly positive. Regina Schroeder, writing in Booklist, said that "Grimsley's yarn is fast paced and adventuresome, and features some interesting gods and their creatures." A contributor to Publishers Weekly concluded that readers will want to read the novel's sequel after reading "the inconclusive ending to this complex work of world-building and large-scale politics seasoned with gore and desperation."

Forgiveness is a satire on the life of an upper-middleclass family. Charlie Stranger, a formerly successful accountant, is unemployed and not looking for a job. His spoiled wife grows tired of waiting for their money to run out and notifies Charlie of her intention to divorce him. Their financial status is worse than expected, and Charlie kills his wife and their banker son. His motivation, it seems, is to land television spots with the top interviewers, make a movie deal on his life and subsequent murders, and gain celebrity. A contributor to Publishers Weekly felt that "Grimsley's tale is a single-minded, scathingly unfunny look at American materialism." Booklist contributor Whitney Scott, however, found Grimsley's novel to be a "smoothly executed, grimly humorous satire."

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Jim Grimsley contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:

The eastern part of North Carolina lies flat and sandy under a bold big sky. In the fifties the countryside clotted with little villages surrounded by small farms growing tobacco, corn, and soybeans. In the fall families still gathered to slaughter their hogs and preserve the meat. Moonshiners distilled a good deal of illegal whiskey back in the pine forests. Black people and white people lived segregated lives from the cradle to the grave. People moved through two social milieus, the church and the school, and life revolved around these centers. No cities existed east of Raleigh, and large towns were rare. Villages hid their millionaires down shadowed driveways and displayed their paupers in shacks along the highway. In this landscape, enduring its changes, I spent the first seventeen years of life, and its memory haunts everything I've done since, good and bad.

I was born to a poor farming couple in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. My father, Jack, came from a tenant farming family who had settled in Edgecombe County after moving from South Carolina. My mother, Mary Brantham, came from a poorer family living in Princeton, North Carolina. Her father had given up farming for day labor, mostly logging and agricultural work. Jack and Mary met at a county fair they both attended, he seventeen and she sixteen. Within a few months Mary crawled out of the window of her father's house with a borrowed dress and a paper sack full of the few clothes she owned and ran off with my father in the night. They were married by a justice of the peace and settled near his family in Rocky Mount.

Some members of the Grimsley family moved into corporate farming, working for the Speight-Davis Seed Farm in Greenville. My father was one of them and moved to another branch of the Speight-Davis holdings, near a village called Pollocksville, to work as foreman on the farm.

My older sister Jackie was born in the years my parents lived in Rocky Mount, and so was I, though my family moved to Pollocksville when I was six months old. We lived on Ravenwood Road in a small green cinderblock house that was built on ground level, a foolish plan for a house in that part of the country. A house raised off the ground had fewer problems with pests, snakes in particular. There are a number of family stories about the snakes we found in various places in that house—under kitchen sinks, in linen closets asleep on folded sheets, coiled in bathtubs.

My sister and I fought and she was apt to bite, so my mother taught me to bite back. My mother tells the story that later she was watching me play in the yard with a dog that nipped at my hand. I calmly bit the dog back and it left me alone.

My brother Jasper was born into the troubles that hit our family in that house. When he was six months old, my father lost his arm in a farming accident, and afterward lost the job and was further crushed by the fact that the farm's insurers denied him any compensation for the accident and the loss of his arm. At about the same time, I suffered an accident of some minor type that bled for an inordinately long time, requiring a trip to the emergency room of the New Bern hospital. My family learned then that I had hemophilia, an inherited disordered passed from mother to son in which the body's blood-clotting mechanism does not function correctly.

The events of these years form the spine of my novel Winter Birds, and the Snake House of that novel is the house on Ravenwood Road I described above.

My family moved from that house and over the next fifteen years moved every year or two into another house in or near Pollocksville. We lived in a pack house where tobacco was sorted and graded at one point, and in empty old general stores, each facing each other across the road, before that. One of those old stores reopened as the only fish market in Jones County and the other was torn down soon after we moved out of it.

My brother Brian was born in one of the empty stores, the one that later became a fish market. He proved to be a hemophiliac like me. The disease skipped my middle brother Jasper, as it can. The severity of the disease varies and my brother's clotting deficiency was more severe than mine.

My father now worked as a gasman for Jenkins Gas Company, delivering bottles of LP gas for people's houses and businesses and bulk gas for farmers to use in curing tobacco. The fact that he had only his right arm and a vacancy at his side hindered his employment possibilities. Both he and my mother had quit high school in order to marry, but my father earned his GED at this time. By then he had become a local legend for the farm accident and the loss of his arm, and his resilience in bouncing back made him admired. But he had become immensely embittered in private and drank heavily. He often beat my mother and kept the family awake through long nights and violent quarrels. We routinely fled the house when he grew too violent to be around, sometimes staying with neighbors, sometimes going to stay with a family member.

My sister started school and I envied her and missed her so much during the day that I would sit by the mailbox to wait for her bus to come home. She was much above me since she was becoming educated but she still deigned to play with me in the afternoons. We dressed up in Mom's clothes and she took me to the store in a dress at one point, earning me a good deal of ridicule that I felt unfair since I thought I looked quite fetching. The telling and retelling of this story served as a constant reminder that I needed to be very secretive about certain parts of myself.

My sexuality was already centered on men and remained so. I remember falling very much in love with the son of a neighbor at age three or four, to the point that my family made fun of me for it that same evening, and I became so ashamed I buried my head in the corner of the couch.

I started school and fell in love with reading. Our school had only enough books for each of us first graders to borrow one at a time and keep it for a week. A particular large, color volume about the trip to the moon caught my eye but someone else always claimed it before me, until my girlfriend Wanda, who sat at the table where the books were spread out, hid it in her lap for me. She was my girlfriend for two weeks, in the way of the first grade. I had no idea what it meant.

In the summer between second and third grade, I had an accident while playing near a tobacco barn. My mother was working in green tobacco, helping to tie it onto wooden tobacco sticks for hanging into a barn to be heat-cured. The crew of women and men working alongside her was large and included a number of children. We played cowboys by tying tobacco twine to one of the tobacco sticks and using the twine to ride the sticks as if they were our horses. The sound of the stick trailing over the dry ground around the barns was very pleasing, albeit nothing like a horse. While I was riding in a posse on my stallion I tripped and hit the ground and bit my tongue.

Given my blood condition, everyone was terrified. For the next three weeks I oozed blood from my tongue, first in the New Bern hospital, and then, when I appeared to be slowly bleeding to death, at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, where there were doctors who knew how to treat hemophilia. Treatment for a bleeding episode was transfusion with blood plasma rather than whole blood, and after several days of this therapy the bleeding finally stopped.

I remember quite vividly lying in the hospital hour after hour with the taste of blood in my mouth, sitting up so it would drain out of my mouth rather than in my stomach, and, later, when the blood had partly clotted, sitting with a mass of soft clot the size of a plum on my tongue.

In 1966, North Carolina schools were desegregated under a plan named, as I recall, Freedom of Choice. Three young black girls chose to attend my white elementary school. In 1968, the separate white and black school systems were merged. In reaction, a whole network of private or church-sponsored academies grew up overnight. White communities were split into those who supported public schools and desegregation and those who supported private schools and segregation. In this era, I began to understand that I had been trained to be a young white segregationist, a racist. The unraveling of that way of thinking made it much easier to understand and accept my homosexuality, the fact of which was becoming clear to me in these years.

I first read the word "homosexual" in either Time or Newsweek at the age of eight or nine, and when I read the definition, I felt much easier about my own fantasies. If there was a name for someone like me, then there must be other people like me.

I worked part-time in a drug store, where I kissed a young man one night. We made plans to meet the next day. I immediately became terrified, called him back and told him I couldn't meet him. The notion of being sexual terrified me, likely for good reason. No one could keep secrets in Pollocksville, which had just over four hundred people living in it.

In junior high school, a teacher named Annette Ford assigned our class to rewrite Edgar Allan Poe's "The Telltale Heart" from the point of view of the man in the bedroom who dies. This is the first assignment of any kind that I recall working on with passion, and I poured myself into the writing of that six or seven pages, doing them over and over gain, up till the moment came to turn in the papers. She gave us other writing assignments that were as stimulating. She taught with such genuine passion that she was fired by our school system before the year was out.

I had already been writing stories since I was eight years old or so. I made books out of index cards bought for my school supplies and tied them together with shoestring. I drew pictures of rabbits and farmers, farmhouses and farmyards, and wrote stories about rabbits out to steal vegetables. When I began to read science fiction, I started to write science fiction stories that I shared with a classmate. I did actually at one time begin a story with the phrase, "It was a dark and stormy night…. " sometime around sixth grade. I wrote a long story in seventh grade about being a genie found by The Monkees and taking them on a long trip to the North Pole.

When I was eleven, which would have been in sixth or seventh grade, I typed and submitted a story to Galaxy magazine. The editor wrote me a very kind letter but refused the story. I sent him story after story and he rejected them. I continued to submit stories to science fiction magazines throughout high school, when I also worked on a horror novel called the Hoffman Journal and a longer science fiction novel about two men who reappear in what looks like the Garden of Eden. (These manuscripts are in my papers in the Duke Library Special Collections. The oldest manuscripts are only partial, as I recall. In the same way, my memory is now only partial, and I cannot recall the names of all these manuscripts, and may cite some incorrectly, since I no longer possess them.)

I wrote a story called "And Then There Were None" in Annette Ford's class that I later rewrote in Governor's School, working on my first IBM Selectric typewriter, the very Cadillac of writing in 1972. The story was about the final survivors of a nuclear war. It was a terrible, melodramatic story, much overblown, but I was winner of a North Carolina Teachers of English Award for it, my first writing distinction of any kind. I had a very good opinion of myself for a while. Later at Chapel Hill my teacher, Doris Betts, would tell me to hold onto those feelings since you need the memory of them the next time you get knocked down.

My family continued to survive intact in some fashion and we enjoyed a period of peace that lasted about a year in which my father swore off alcohol. Any number of people tried to help him but his unhappiness was simply too deep. In my senior year of high school my parents finally separated for good. My mother remarried within a year and moved the rest of the family away from Pollocksville. After the Christmas of my freshman year of college, I would not see the town again for many years.

The years I spent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gave me my first chance at a stable day-to-day life in which I could be reasonably sure I could sleep through the night. I had a home environment that I could control myself. My roommate for two years was a gentle person named Philip who was easy to live with.

In my freshman year I attended Campus Crusade for Christ meetings with a Christian boy, sexual desires for whom I was trying to repress through religion. This was not a workable plan and I soon abandoned evangelism and the Christian boy.

Later in college I worked for the Daily Tar Heel as a copyeditor and finally as managing editor. Once I met the newspaper staff I no longer had to worry about lack of a social life. In sophomore year I got a page-long rejection from an editor at Galaxy for my best science fiction story to that date. In the same year I discovered that the university offered creative writing classes that would give me academic credit for all this writing I was doing. So I enrolled in Doris Betts's writing class, which was supposed to be open only to freshmen. I sat as close to her right hand as I could get and watch her puff cigarettes on that long cigarette holder she always sported, fixing those intense eyes of hers on one and another of us. She wrote in my class journal that I wrote twice as much and twice as well as anybody else in the class, and I treasured the words. I found all her books and read them. She read my fiction with great patience till I finally realized I should stop sending it, a few years after college. She made meticulous, neat notes on each story she read, and constantly criticized my female characters. In her careful notes and editing she showed me the worth of rewriting without saying a word about it.

Max Steele was the other great teacher with whom I worked. Max at first decided that I was Doris's student and he paid more attention to other students as if to show me he could. Max was always deciding what people were really up to and whose alliance was really with whom. He taught in the least formal manner of anyone with whom I ever studied. He read us stories in class, including Wolfgang Borchert's "The Bread," and his own "Where She Brushed Her Hair." We read stories to each other. Max would pick at each story and start to talk, and to get us to pick fights with each other. He was never so happy as when he could set a class to fighting over something a student had written. Late in that first class I wrote a story that touched him deeply and after that we spent more time together, including the occasional lunch in Hillsborough. At the time I was writing what would become the opening chapters of Winter Birds, my first novel. I told him the story that I needed to tell and he said, very seriously, that it was a story in which I had to set down every detail exactly as I remembered, right down to the planks on the porch floor.

I have never had any career ambition other than to be a writer, at first of science fiction. I wrote obsessively in these years, leaving off science fiction for a while and practicing the notion of a literary story, a story in which the primary value was placed on the quality of the writing rather than any matter related to the content. I had never considered writing fiction about real life until I started studying writing at Chapel Hill, but I found myself drawn to the writing and the study of literature so deeply that I did not have to consider my choices for long. Chapel Hill offered an English degree with a concentration in writing, and that was my course of study. I should say in gratitude that I attended University of North Carolina as a James M. Johnston Scholar.

I published stories in Cellar Door, the undergraduate literary magazine that started publication at Chapel Hill during my years there. One of them, part of what I was calling Winter Birds at the time, won the undergraduate fiction prize, the Jesse Rehder Prize, the same year that my friend Roxanne won the same prize for poetry. Both of us came from tiny Jones County. We were roommates at the time and relished the notion.

My father died in my senior year of college, drinking a good deal of whiskey and taking a large overdose of Valium. I have called this a suicide though my aunts and uncles did not agree. I attended his funeral with Jackie and Jasper. Brian and Mom were living out of state and would not come. We left his grave unmarked until 2004.

My first story published for money was titled "House on the Edge." I sold it to the New Orleans Review, published by Loyola University, in my graduating semester. I had not paid attention to my credit hours entirely and needed one more class of some kind in order to graduate, and I completed this last semester of work in spring of 1978.

After college I moved to New Orleans where I lived for nearly three years. I rented an apartment near Magazine Street across from a woman named Mary Lundy. In that apartment I had my first serious episode of bleeding in four or five years. I injured my calf and could not walk. I delayed seeking treatment for several days since I had not dealt with the issue on my own before, a foolish choice. When I finally went to Charity Hospital for treatment I was in a lot of pain.

Hemophilia episodes into soft tissue and joints are far more common than the problem I had with my tongue, and I had been plagued by smaller or larger bleeds throughout my childhood, up until college, when suddenly I had no serious bleeding episodes for years. Bleeds into joints and tissue are intensely painful, since the fluid is forcing itself into the tissue space and continues to do so without stopping until the pressure on both sides of the gash in the veins is equal. This requires an enormous inflation of the tissues. A bleed feels like having your tissue blown up like a balloon very slowly, a few drops of blood at a time.

Medicine for hemophilia had improved by this point, and my injuries were treated with a frozen plasma concentrate that isolated the part of the plasma that contained clotting factor to provide a more concentrated dose. I learned about this treatment in Charity Hospital in its Hemophilia Treatment Center, which treated me for the injury to my leg and taught me to administer my own treatment.

In New Orleans I came into contact with a full-fledged gay neighborhood, the lower French Quarter, and went out with a friend, Greg, to the bars there. Pre-HIV gay culture in New Orleans was promiscuous, raucous, often anonymous. I became a magnet for men who had slipped their wedding rings into their pockets, in town for the weekend, ashamed to be kissed on the street.

I worked at a liquor store, Martin Wine Cellar, and then as a customer service telephone specialist for a sanitary maintenance products master distributor and mopmaker named Lagasse Brothers. The business was run by two brothers who used their GI bill money after World War II to start a mop factory next to their mother's house in the Irish Channel. I took orders for mops, cleaning products, and Rubbermaid supplies from companies all over the southeast. Hurricanes were our busy season.

In the spring after my first injury in New Orleans, while still working at Martin's, I became jaundiced and ill. A doctor I saw told me I had hepatitis simply by looking at the yellow color of my skin and told me to get myself to Charity Hospital right away. I had no health insurance at the time and relied on Charity already for care of my hemophilia. So I went to Charity and lived in the hospital for three weeks, my friends bringing me food nearly every day to keep me from starving. Charity was in the middle of a funding crisis and a severe nursing shortage at the time, and there were few nurses to care for patients, who were still housed in large wards. One young man in my ward had been in a motorcycle accident that shattered his leg and constantly shouted for pain medication, sometimes through the night.

My first experience dealing with health care and hospitals showed me how much stress and bad luck my health had brought my parents during their marriage. This same illness in North Carolina would likely have ruined me for a number of years financially. Due to the fact that Charity was in fact a charity hospital and the fact that hospital systems were disastrous, I was never billed a penny for that hospital stay. So at least I got my money's worth.

One social worker in the hospital informed me, on a later outpatient visit, that I was completely disabled and should apply for handicapped status, because there was no way I was ever going to be able to work. I thanked her and left her office and went back to my job.

During all this era I was writing. I completed the draft of the book that would become Winter Birds in New Orleans during that first year. I continued work on other sections I planned for the novel for two more years. But what would eventually become the published novel was written by the end of my first year in New Orleans, about the time I quit my job at the liquor store.

A friend of mine who worked at a publishing company called Ariel Books called me and told me his boss had pitched a science fiction novel to a larger publishing house recently and the bigger house wanted to read the manuscript. So Ariel Books wanted to hire me to come and write a draft of this novel in three days in New York. I flew to New York and typed out something that looked like the draft of a novel, maybe two hundred plus pages. It had something to do with an asteroid and big Star Wars-like ship coming to attack it. A lone fighter attacked the monster ship and destroyed it. By the end of the three days I was in a blur. I stayed at the Harvard Club as a guest of the publisher. I do not think I made an impressive guest in any way.

This led to a contract to write a serious draft of the novel, for which I was paid a nice sum of money. I was able to move into a larger apartment on Jackson Avenue and to rent an IBM Selectric typewriter with a correction button, than which there was no greater heaven at the time. The Ariel publisher sent me notes about the story that were mostly nonsense siphoned out of Luke Skywalker. I wrote a story that came as close to what he asked for as I could without writing the muck that he was suggesting. I could almost feel his Hollywood energy pouring off him as he dictated his notes into his Dictaphone. The result never saw print but for a while I lived on my writing.

Late in that year I applied for a Hoyn Fellowship to attend the University of Virginia's Master of Fine Arts Program in writing, where Peter Taylor was teaching at the time. I won the fellowship, moved to Charlottesville, made some bad decisions about apartments and ended up in a basement with a mattress. I began to get hassled on the streets for being a sissy, mostly from teenagers in passing trucks. This was my first experience with that kind of hassle. I found myself homesick for New Orleans and left Virginia after attending a single class, in which the professor assigned a paper, the thought of the writing of which left me weary to my bones. I bought a ticket back to New Orleans and asked Lagasse Brothers for my old job back.

I settled into that life for another year and finished all the sections of Winter Birds. I've estimated the number of manuscript pages that I wrote for that novel to be anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 pages at one time or another. The manuscripts are scattered over a number of notebooks and include at least two attempts at the book that reached 200-to-300 pages in handwritten work until I abandoned them. My original notion of the book was that it would be in three sections, the first about Danny's childhood, the second about college, and the third about his sexual awakening. I wrote all those sections, ending them in a huge rainstorm that flooded the streets of New Orleans. By then I was living in the French Quarter in an apartment near the corner of Dumaine and Daupine, behind the coin laundry on Dumaine. Both coin laundry and apartment remain. I lived there with a friend from college.

French Quarter life soon taught me that I might easily drink myself to death in New Orleans. I wrote and sold a few short stories during these years, including sales to the Carolina Quarterly. The Quarterly published "Blood House," a chapter of Winter Birds and a retelling of the tongue-biting episode from my childhood, though the inciting incident in the book is much different, a family quarrel. They also published "City and Park," the first story I wrote with a gay theme that passed to publication, and "Silver Bullet," a long story about Danny's coming-out to his mother and to his memories about the central incident in Winter Birds. They published "We Move in a Rigorous Line," a title that I stole from Cordwainer Smith, though I did not realize it until years later at a science fiction convention.

In New Orleans, following the completion of Winter Birds, I turned to writing a fantasy novel called Kirith Kirin. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, then started typing them and hated them all and started the book over again. Soon after I commenced this work, I moved to Atlanta.

In visiting a friend, Lisa Corley, who lived in Atlanta, I came into contact with a very vibrant group of Atlanta theater people. By then I was looking for something other than trips to the gay bar in the evening, and so the thought of working with people who were interested in art was appealing. Those people existed in New Orleans at the time, but I had not put myself in the way of meeting them.

I lived in Atlanta, began to work as a temp, and took a role in a Shakespeare play, Solanio in "The Merchant of Venice" for Atlanta Shakespeare Association, the company that has now become the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern. I had planned this exodus a bit better and went to see my new hemophilia doctor at Grady Memorial Hospital as soon as I arrived in town. My third temp assignment also landed me in Grady as the area clerk in the Gastrointestinal Clinic, checking patients in for endoscopies and proctoscopies. I would work at Grady hospital in one capacity or another for the next eighteen years. The year was 1981.

I rewrote Winter Birds and acted in local plays for a while, never extensively. At some point I understood that the design for the book was too large and that the actual meat of the novel was in the first section. A legendary editor, Bill Whitehead, read the book twice, once in its extended version and once in its abridged version, when I cut the novel to its present length and state. He wrote me that the novel was publishable at that point and he congratulated me but added that he did not love the book enough to publish it himself. I have always stated that 1984 was the year when I finally completed Winter Birds, cutting away the gross excess, so I expect this was the year in which Whitehead read the revised manuscript and said no to it once and for all.

I had begun writing plays in 1982, starting with something awful that I never finished. I also joined with a group of theater people in Atlanta and moved into a warehouse space on North Highland Avenue near Manuel's Tavern, literally, body and soul. We converted part of the warehouse to living space and used the rest for rehearsal and performance, founding our own nonprofit theater company, ACME Theatre. We produced my first play there, "The Existentialists," a story about the mass murder of its human family as told by its cats. Opening night was Friday, May 13, 1983, marking ACME's third production. I codirected the play with Monty Schuth and he designed a set that surrounded the audience. The play was very disturbing and drew a good audience though no good reviews that I remember. I watched it over and over again, fascinated to sit there and listen to the way it changed night to night.

A year later I began my relationship with Seven Stages of Atlanta with the production of my second play, a musical called "The Earthlings." Del Hamilton directed the play and many of the people whose energy had drawn me to Atlanta in the first place were in it. At ACME Theater we were running our fourth and final production in that communal space, a variety show called "1985" that opened on New Year's Day, 1984. Soon after this show opened, a fire downstairs in the warehouse drew the attention of the city to what we were doing, and our theater was ordered to vacate the space immediately. We struggled to hold onto another space of a similar kind for another year, probably a terrible mistake.

My writing life in these years consisted of plays and Kirith Kirin, the fantasy novel on which I had been working since coming to Atlanta. I had started the novel a third time, this time got a beginning that I liked.

In the middle of 1984 I was contacted by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to be part of the study of the prevalence of the recently identified Human Immunodeficiency Virus in hemophiliacs. I gave some blood at the CDC headquarters there in the city and was paid something like forty dollars. The study personnel told me I'd be informed of the results of my test.

Several weeks later I read an account in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of a study conducted by the CDC demonstrating that over eighty percent of hemophiliacs were already infected with HIV. I asked my doctor at Grady to contact the CDC and learned at that point that I was positive for the virus. The CDC had tested older blood samples from tests I'd been part of to determine the prevalence of hepatitis in the hemophiliac population, back to 1981. I was positive for HIV all the way back to the earliest blood samples the CDC had on file for me.

Shortly afterward, I left the theater commune at ACME and moved into an apartment of my own.

For the next several years I dealt with the shock of HIV, worked at Grady Hospital, wrote and produced plays, and played an active part in the theater community in Atlanta. I worked at Seven Stages as playwright-in-residence beginning in 1986. This relationship with the theater provided me production venues for my new plays when I developed them with the theater, grant support for me when the theater could obtain it, and a steady support for development of new work, including readings and workshops of new scripts. This relationship endures to this day.

I continued to seek a publisher for Winter Birds with no success and continued to write occasional short stories and publish stories in literary quarterlies intermittently. In these years I was largely writing plays, returning to work on Kirith Kirin on occasion.

My first play as playwright-in-residence for Seven Stages debuted in 1987 in the theater's new space, still its home, on Euclid Avenue. "Mr. Universe" was the first play that I wrote in which I am completely writing as a playwright, having shed the prosy style of the earlier plays I had produced. It told the story of two men who lived together in the French Quarter of New Orleans, doing drag together in the evenings and going out to bars. They find a mute bodybuilder who's been beaten up on the streets and take him home. The search to find his identity changes their lives and the lives of their friends drastically. The play was my first critical hit in Atlanta.

The play had also drawn the interest of Woody King at the New Federal Theater Off-Broadway in New York. He produced the play in March, 1988, a production that was reviewed favorably in the New York Times and in other papers. The play won the Oppenheimer-Newsday Award that year for best new American playwright. I was very proud, thinking this would lead to a revival of the play in New York, since the run at New Federal was limited. Had I known more about the realities of New York, I'd have understood that this was highly unlikely. The play was eventually produced in Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, and was published later when Algonquin Books released a volume of my plays.

For the next several years I produced a play every year or so at Seven Stages, and worked in other venues in Atlanta as well. ACME Theater had become a perfor-

mance troupe and we continued to do one night shows in various places. I participated in some but not all of these, but I worked enough in odd venues to learn the value of energy in front of an audience. I did one-act plays at the old Nexus Theater in Atlanta.

My plays at Seven Stages in these years included "Math and Aftermath" (1988), the story of a film troupe and its auteur director filming a noir porn film on the beaches of Bikini Atoll the night before the explosion of the hydrogen bomb test. "White People," (1989) presented an environmental staging of short dramatic pieces concerned with what white people are and what they do that defines them as white. "The Lizard of Tarsus" pictured a Christ of the Second Coming imprisoned by an immortal Paul of Tarsus, who puts Christ through a version of the Inquisition. "Belle Ives" (1991) staged a family drama set in the desegregation-era south, and "The Borderland" (1996) dramatized a one-night culture clash between a prosperous family and their poorer country neighbors. "The Borderland" debuted in New York in 1994.

Also in those years plays of mine were produced in other venues, including "Man with a Gun," (1989) a commissioned AIDs work presented at Nexus Theater by SAME in Atlanta, and "The Fall of the House of Usher," (1991) an adaptation of the Poe story produced by Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta.

Some of these plays were produced in limited ways in other cities. "Math and Aftermath," "The Borderland," and "The Lizard of Tarsus" all received Off-Off-Broadway productions by a brave group of people including Elisabeth Lewis Corley, Dean Gray, and Joseph Megel, who were determined to give me a chance in New York.

I continued to seek a publisher for Winter Birds and tried intermittently, though never with enough contacts, to feel I was making real headway.

In 1990 I met a man named Frank Heibert, a German who was connected to Seven Stages through the accident of his having been hired to interpret for Del Hamilton of the theater on one of his early trips to Germany. He later told Del of his plans to found a publishing company in Germany that would produce works by foreign writers not then making their way into Germany. Del suggested my book to him as one he might look at, and Frank called me and asked me to send the manuscript to him. I reminded him that the book was not published in English in the United States and that it did not sound like the kind of book he was seeking. He told me, in so many words, that he'd be the judge of that. He read the book and called me the next day to say he wanted to publish the novel and he was certain his partner in the venture would want to do so as well.

I agreed to the publication of Winter Birds by a German publisher that had yet to publish a single book. Nevertheless, the book had been sitting unpublished for some six years at that point, and I saw no reason to say no. I signed a contract for the novel and received an advance of approximately 600 dollars. The book was released in German translation by Frank in 1992. I did a reading in Berlin, Frank reading in German from his German version while I read passages in English.

As a condition for publication of the book, Zebra Books, Frank's German company, wanted a trilogy of novels about Danny. This was eerily similar to the original three-part design for the novel, and I agreed, though, luckily, I did not resurrect those sections of the old novel, and they remain buried comfortably in the Duke Library.

Further, Frank wanted to act as agent for the novel and try to sell it elsewhere.

I began work on a second novel called Comfort and Joy during the preparation of the German version of Winter Birds. The novel told the story of Danny years after the incidents of the first book, taking home his male boyfriend to meet his family at Christmas.

During 1993 I had my first case of pneumocystis pneumonia, the kind of pneumonia associated with AIDS. My T-cells had dropped significantly. I had been treated by a doctor at Grady for years but he was leaving Grady and passed my care to someone else. In fact, I disliked the someone else and fell out of care for a while. I survived the pneumonia and recovered, but continued to be casual about seeing the doctor. At this point I had been HIV positive for over ten years.

Frank located a French publisher, Métailié, interested in publishing a French edition of Winter Birds, and soon after convinced Algonquin Books, who had rejected the book in 1985, to read it again. He made both these contacts at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In 1993, when I was in Germany to read from the edition of Comfort and Joy that had recently been published there, Frank and I confirmed the decision to publish Winter Birds with Algonquin. A year later, Winter Birds appeared in French as its second language and in English as its third.

The book quickly won a prize in France, the Prix Charles Brisset, given by the French Academy of Psychiatrists and Psychotherapists, likely due to the frank depiction of domestic violence in the book. I would later describe this prize as being for best novel by and about a crazy person, though in fact it was an honor and I was and am quite grateful.

The book sold its initial printings and was in a fourth printing by spring of 1995. The book was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and won the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For my second U.S. novel I chose to publish a new book I had written by then, called Dream Boy. Algonqin's first reactions to the manuscript of Comfort and Joy were negative and I agreed that book, even in the form that had been published already in Germany, needed work.

Dream Boy appeared in late summer of 1995, receiving a glowing starred review in Publishers Weekly and generating a lot of buzz, easily my best debut for any book. The reviews led to a paperback deal with Scribner to publish both Dream Boy and Winter Birds; both books remain in print. The book received the 1996 Stonewall Award from the American Library Association and was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in the same year. I toured in over thirty cities to promote the novel while working part-time at Grady Hospital and teaching an adjunct writing course at Emory University. By the end of the year the press of this work caught up to me on a trip to Denver and San Francisco. In Denver, at a cocktail party to promote the Ucross Ranch and the Hemingway Award in the Tattered Cover [bookstore], I mentioned to Annie Proulx that I had an odd backache in the middle of my back. I thought it might be from exercise, I claimed, flattering myself. By the end of the weekend I could barely breathe and understood I had pneumonia, now for the second time.

This time the pneumonia was much more serious and resisted a number of treatments the doctor tried. I was trying to complete work on a novel and continued to work on it in the hospital. My initial discharge from the hospital was followed by a second trip to the hospital caused by various problems. Five to six weeks after the conversation with Annie Proulx, I crawled out of the hospital and went home in a friend's truck. For another month I woke every six hours around the clock to administer IV medicine to myself, living in my apartment alone with my cat. Fevers ebbed and finally ended and I went back to work at Grady soon after.

After this I stayed with the doctor who had treated me in the hospital and became a faithful patient. I was lucky in that this second round of pneumonia, when my immune system was finally breaking down and yielding to the virus, came at a time when the three-drug cocktail emerged as very effective therapy. Within a few months my viral levels went from over a million to around zero, and my T-cell counts became healthy again, meaning that my immune system had recovered.

That summer, I worked on a new play called "A Bird of Prey" with the Young Conservatory at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, working with Craig Slaight, the extraordinary visionary and director of that program. The play was one of the best moments of my life, a perfectly assembled group of people working with me as I rewrote and expanded the play. The workshop was powerful and so well performed I felt stunned by the work of the young people. This play has been performed in many venues since, some controversial; in Wisconsin in 2003 a production of this play was closed down by its high school producers. People in the community eventually moved the play to a local venue and produced it there.

I had completed the third novel of mine that would be published in the U.S. at the same time, My Drowning, the story of my mother and her childhood told in the form of fiction, blending some of the stories my aunts used to tell around the kitchen table with what I remembered. Algonquin released an edition in 1997 that was the first of my novels to be reviewed in the New York Times. To date, in fact, this is the only of my nine novels to receive a Times review. The book won me my first designation as Georgia Author of the Year. It was republished the following year by Scribner as a paperback, and is currently available as a print-on-demand book through Scribner. The copies I see are quite ugly.

In 1998, Algonquin published a volume of four of my plays, Mr. Universe and Other Plays. The selection included the title play, "Math and Aftermath," "The Borderland," and "The Lizard of Tarsus." The plays were introduced by Kaye Gibbons, Reynolds Price, Romulus Linney, and Craig Lucas. The book was a Lambda finalist in the drama category. In that year I also won a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, which included a three-year support of 35,000 dollars per year. This was perhaps the nicest surprise I ever got. However, the award letter was two or three pages long, and the first two pages read like a grant solicitation, so I didn't actually realize what I'd won until the foundation contacted me again to find out whether I wanted to accept.

I had completed a rewrite of Comfort and Joy during a Ucross residency in 1995, where I lived with Laura Hendrie and Ann Patchett and where I first met Annie Proulx over a dinner table. Algonquin agreed to publish the book after My Drowning and we released

that book in the fall of 1999. The book was a Lambda Award finalist that year.

In that year I left my employment at Grady Hospital for good, having won a teaching job at Emory University from a search committee including Lynna Williams and Xuefei Jin, better known by his pen name Ha Jin. I started work as a lecturer in Creative Writing in the fall of 1999 and am still teaching in the same position. My office is still the former men's bathroom on the third floor and there is still a vent over my desk from the old hood over the toilet.

In 1999 I completed work on Kirith Kirin, the novel I began in 1980 in New Orleans, and showed it to a friend of mine, Stephen Pagel, who worked in a science fiction bookstore and ran a science fiction publishing house. He agreed to do the book and published it in 2000. The book won a Lambda Award in the Horror/SF/Fantasy category in 2001 and was published in a three-volume Japanese edition in 2006. I made the decision to move into science fiction publishing cautiously, since I had no intention of using a pen name. I have been working at science fiction and fantasy for many years, I am a serious reader of these fields, and wanted to publish in them as myself. Along with the novels, I began to write and publish a series of short stories set in the Hormling universe, which includes Kirith Kirin.

My short story "Into Greenwood," published in Asimov's [Science Fiction magazine] in 2001, won an Asimov's Readers Poll Award for that year and was reprinted in two best of the year anthologies.

I worked for several years on a novel called Boulevard, at first the story of a fictional city much like New Orleans, but later simply a story of New Orleans. The book tells the story of Newell, a young, attractive man who moves to the city with next to nothing and makes a life for himself there for about a year, exploring the same territory I explored when I lived there, though with a penchant for the dangerous parts that frightened me a bit too much. He comes to a point at which he feels he is losing himself and does something particularly dangerous, comes out of it alive, and catches the next bus for home. The book is an attempt to tell the story of a city that I love very much, and a moment of its history, admittedly of the seedier variety. The sexual territory of the late 1970s appears very strange when viewed from the era of HIV, and the book is about that moment. It was published by Algonquin in 2002 and was a Lambda finalist for that year. The book won me my second designation as Georgia Author of the Year.

In 2003 I wrote a play under commission for the Young Conservatory at ACT in San Francisco and Theater Royal Bath. The play, called "War Daddy," told the story of children caught up in a war that their parents had been fighting for longer than anyone could remember. It was produced at both theaters in 2003-2004.

In 2004 a developmental work in which I participated as chief writer premiered at the Alliance Theater. Entitled "Leap," it was appreciated by few, likely for good reason.

The following year I published a science fiction novel as a follow up to Kirith Kirin, telling the story of the conflict between a world based on science and a world

based on magic. The Ordinary was published by Tor Books in 2004, and they published it as a paperback a year later. The Ordinary won me my second Lambda Award in the Horror/SF/Fantasy category and was named one of the ten best SF novels of the year by Booklist.

In 2006 Tor Books published The Last Green Tree, my third science fiction novel and my eighth novel overall. This book continues the story of the earlier two works, though the novel is independent of them in terms of story.

Earlier in 2007, my ninth novel, a monologue by a man named Charley Stranger, was released by the University of Texas Press. Charley was an Arthur Anderson employee who lost his job as a result of the Enron scandal and has since been out of work. At the point at which his money runs out, his wife asks for a divorce and he begins to plot her murder, seeking to stage it in such a way that he will receive press attention and even media glory. The work is not quite comic by the end.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advocate, March 4, 1997, review of My Drowning, p. 59; April 30, 2002, review of Boulevard, p. 65.

American Theatre, November, 2002, Frank J. Baldaro, review of Boulevard, p. 79.

Bomb, fall, 1998, Nelson Taylor, review of Mr. Universe and Other Plays.

Booklist, August, 1994, George Needham, review of Winter Birds, p. 2022; September 15, 1995, Charles Harmon, review of Dream Boy, p. 142; November 15, 1996, Gilbert Taylor, review of My Drowning, p. 549; September 15, 1999, Brad Hooper, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 231; March 15, 2002, Michael Spinella, review of Boulevard, p. 1211; April 15, 2004, Paula Luedtke, review of The Ordinary, p. 1431; November 15, 2006, Regina Schroeder, review of The Last Green Tree, p. 37; March 15, 2007, Whitney Scott, review of Forgiveness, p. 24.

Chicago Review, winter, 1996, David Ebershoff, review of Dream Boy, p. 89.

Chronicle, June, 2004, Don D'Ammassa, review of The Ordinary, p. 40.

City Paper (Philadelphia, PA), October 12-19, 1995, Kelly McQuain, review of Dream Boy.

Entertainment Weekly, December 17, 1999, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 79.

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, spring, 2000, Randall Curb, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 52.

Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, spring, 1996, review of Dream Boy, p. 42.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1994, review of Winter Birds, p. 869; July 15, 1995, review of Dream Boy, p. 971; November 1, 1996, review of My Drowning, p. 1552; September 1, 1999, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 1332; April 1, 2000, review of Kirith Kirin, p. 431; February 1, 2002, review of Boulevard, p. 124.

Lambda Book Report, September-October, 1994, Bob Summer, review of Winter Birds, p. 20; October, 1997, Trisha Collopy, review of My Drowning, p. 24; December, 1999, Nathan G. Tipton, "Jim Grimsley's Newfound Comfort and Joy," interview with author, p. 12; August, 2002, Greg Herren, review of Boulevard, p. 8; January-March, 2005, Steve Berman, review of The Ordinary, p. 24.

Library Journal, August, 1994, Lawrence Rungren, review of Winter Birds, p. 128; September 1, 1995, Robert E. Brown, review of Dream Boy, p. 207; November 1, 1996, Lawrence Rungren, review of My Drowning, p. 107; October 1, 1999, Theodore R. Salvadori, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 134; May 15, 2000, Jackie Cassada, review of Kirith Kirin, p. 128; January, 2002, T.R. Salvadori, review of Boulevard, p. 152; April 15, 2004, Devon Thomas, review of The Ordinary, p. 129.

Locus, September, 2002, review of Kirith Kirin, p. 31.

National Catholic Reporter, May 23, 1997, Candice Sackuvich, review of My Drowning, p. 27.

New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1997, Edward Hower, review of My Drowning, p. 17.

New Yorker, October 24, 1994, Craig Seligman, review of Winter Birds, p. 99.

People, May 19, 1997, Francine Prose, review of My Drowning, p. 42.

Publishers Weekly, August 1, 1994, review of Winter Birds, p. 71; July 10, 1995, review of Dream Boy, p. 41; November 4, 1996, review of My Drowning, p. 61; September 6, 1999, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 81; November 15, 1999, Lisa Howorth, "Jim Grimsley: Tales of Southern Courage," p. 39; January 28, 2002, review of Boulevard, p. 267; April 19, 2004, review of The Ordinary, p. 45; October 16, 2006, review of The Last Green Tree, p. 39; January 15, 2007, review of Forgiveness, p. 33.

Rapport, 1997, review of My Drowning, p. 13.

San Francisco Review of Books, September, 1995, review of Dream Boy, p. 6.

School Library Journal, March, 1996, Chip Barnett, review of Dream Boy, p. 232.

Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 1999, Michael Newton, review of My Drowning, p. 21.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1996, review of Dream Boy, p. 62.

Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 1996, review of Dream Boy, p. 370.

Washington Post Book World, October 8, 1995, review of Dream Boy, p. 9; November 21, 1999, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 8.

World and I, June, 1997, review of My Drowning, p. 263.