Biography

He studied creative writing with Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish

Gordon Jay Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Richard Ford.-Early life and family:...

 at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. As a gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 writer, he has explored issues of race, of sexual identity

Sexual identity

Sexual identity is a term that, like sex, has two distinctively different meanings. One describes an identity roughly based on sexual orientation, the other an identity based on sexual characteristics, which is not socially based but based on biology, a concept related to, but different from,...

, of how we make a family for ourselves in order to surmount the limitations of the families into which we are born. He is the creator of the concept of Dangerous Writing.

Dangerous Writing

"Dangerous Writing" is an approach to writing championed by Spanbauer. He teaches a fiction writing workshop by the same name in Portland; Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...

 is probably Spanbauer's best-known student.

Dangerous Writing is a brand of minimalism that utilizes many literary techniques pioneered by Spanbauer and other Gordon Lish-influenced writers. The emphasis is on writing "dangerously" -- that is, writing what personally scares or embarrasses the author in order to explore and artistically express those fears honestly. Most "dangerous writing" is written in first-person narrative

First-person narrative

First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

 for this reason and deals with subjects such as cultural taboo

Taboo

A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...

s.

On the surface, that may not seem like a dangerous or even daring act. But it is. When the words one believes to be the truth about oneself are actually written, they take on a power that is no longer exclusively controlled by the writer. The spin that could be applied when the ideas were merely in a person's mind or coming out of a person's mouth melt away. The words lay the heart bare for all to see. Those words become a separate entity, an unflinching, unvarnished document of the self.

Examples

• In his essay, "She Breaks Your Heart," Chuck Palahniuk
  Chuck Palahniuk
  Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...
  
   explains the "dangerous writing" technique.

• Amy Hempel
  Amy Hempel
  Amy Hempel is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Brooklyn College.-Life:Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois...
  
  's short story, "The Harvest," employs many of the minimalist concepts taught by Spanbauer in his workshop.

Works

• Faraway Places (1989)
• The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
  The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon
  The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a 1991 novel by American author Tom Spanbauer set at the beginning of the 20th century. Told primarily in flashback by its protagonist, a half-breed Native American named Out-There-In-The-Shed , most of the action occurs in the late 19th century in the...
  
  (1991)
• In The City Of Shy Hunters (2001)
• Now Is The Hour (2007)

Volume 1 of The Quarterly

The Quarterly

Gordon Lish founded and edited the avant garde literary magazine, The Quarterly in 1987. The Quarterly showcased the work of contemporary authors.Volume 1 of The Quarterly was published in the Spring of 1987...

, published in the Spring of 1987, featured Spanbauer's "Sea Animals".

External links

• Official site
• Review of In The City... at The Stranger.com
• http://www.glbtq.com/literature/spanbauer_t.html