Douglas Trevor

I was born in Pasadena, California, but we left when I was three, in part because the pollution in the LA area exacerbated my asthma. We moved to Denver, and in a few short years the pollution there was almost as bad as it had been in LA. Nonetheless we stayed. I'm very fond of the Denver I remember as a child. it was a city that I always felt encouraged exploration: that was laid back and at times a little sleepy but also diverse. I've been reading up on Denver history recently for the new novel I've just begun drafting and I can't believe how rich the history of the city is compared with what I learned as a child.

I wrote my first short story at the age of six and never stopped writing after that. In high school I heard that Princeton University had a great creative writing program so I applied there early decision and didn't even consider going anywhere else. I wanted to work with Joyce Carol Oates and I did. She was a great mentor--very frank and incredibly funny. Her jokes never quite declared themselves as such, so to laugh was always to take something of a risk, which made her classes captivating and intense. Joyce treated all of her students like grownups. If she didn't like a story she'd say so. If she wasn't sure what she thought, she'd say that too (but usually she was pretty sure). The other writing teachers I had at Princeton were similarly astounding: Russell Banks, Stuart Dybek, Toni Morrison, and the poet Lea Baechler. As a young writer, I also had a chance to work with Madison Smartt Bell. I've picked over these various encounters my entire adult life because my instruction as a writer stopped more or less after college. I didn't pursue an MFA degree; at that age, I felt just as bookish as I did creative, so I decided to go into academia.

I had been a Comparative Literature /​ Creative Writing Major at Princeton, specializing in sixteenth-century, French Literature--really just the essays of Montaigne, which I found absolutely mesmerizing. After college, I used a Rotary Scholarship to go to France and study Montaigne at the University of Tours. That was a great year. I worked with a Montaigne scholar named Michel Simonin--terrifying but also very kind--and I wrote a ton: including a rough draft of the story "The River" to which I would return many years later.

After France I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to start a doctoral program in English Literature at Harvard. I spent six years at Harvard and I enjoyed just about all of them. The place struck me as an enormously exciting, as did the city of Boston, which is itself more or less a character in the novel I finished this past year (hopefully it will be out by the end of 2012). I had started to publish stories by the time I arrived at Harvard, first in The Ontario Review in 1994, then in River City and The Madison Review. In November of 1998 my sister, Jolee, died very unexpectedly and my life became for a time very dark and sad. It seemed to rain in Boston from the day of her death, November 17th, until I received my Ph.D. the following June. I accepted an assistant professorship in Renaissance Literature at the University of Iowa at that time, and moved to Iowa City in August of 1999. In 2005 I received tenure and in 2007 I accepted a position teaching Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where I still work.

My publications fall on either side of the "creative" and the "academic" divide (that there is such a stark divide is, I think, undeniable and also a little disheartening). My fiction has appeared in, among other places, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The New England Review, Epoch, The Notre Dame Review, Fugue, and, most recently, The Michigan Quarterly Review. In 2006 I won an O. Henry Award for my story "Girls I Know," which was also anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. As an academic, my work has focused primarily on the early modern understanding of the passions, and the depiction of emotions in literary texts. I've written on a number of different writers, from Thomas More to John Donne to George Herbert, and published in journals such as Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare Studies, and The Sixteenth Century Journal. Recently I've focused my energies principally on the works of Shakespeare and Milton. Currently, I'm writing an academic monograph on the history of charity in Western Europe, and beginning a novel set in Denver.