Bill Loehfelm
http://www.billloehfelm.com
I was born in Brooklyn, NY on October 15, 1969, to the
former Diane Murphy and Bill Loehfelm. At eighteen months,
my folks split. My father moved to Manhattan and my mother
remained in Brooklyn with me, resuming her career as a
grammar school teacher and facing the tough prospect of
being a single parent in the early-70's.
When I was three, my mother married Stephen McDonald. Our
new family soon welcomed a second son, Stephen, and moved to
Eltingville on the southern end of Staten Island.
Throughout the 70's and 80's, two more brothers, John and
then Michael, came into my life. With four boys and at least
one dog, our house was a bit of a circus, but life was good.
I was a Cub Scout, played on a soccer team, went to public
school until high school. I went to an all-boys Catholic
school where I lived mostly as an outsider with an affinity
for writing, comic books, hard rock and punk. I attended
writing workshops at the public library and helped restart
the school literary magazine.
In 1987, I went away to college at the University of
Scranton, where I was a slightly underachieving, good time
student. I studied communications, considered both
advertising and First Amendment law, before deciding to be a
teacher. After graduation in 1991, I started a career
teaching high school English on Staten Island. Dying to get
off Staten Island, I moved to Sea Bright, NJ, a tiny beach
town on the shore that, ironically, was destroyed by a flood
in 1992 and rebuilt in 1993. I lived in Jersey and taught on
SI until 1997, when I moved to New Orleans.
In New Orleans, I taught for three more years. Summer of
'99, I wrote the first draft of my first novel. The love of
writing I knew in high school leapt back to life, and, about
to turn thirty, I decided writing was what I needed to be
doing. I left teaching, taking a succession of part-time
jobs to support myself as I wrote. I attended graduate
school at the University of New Orleans, where I met my wife
and rediscovered the type of artistic community I had found
in those Saturday morning library workshops.
My wife and I graduated UNO, with our MFA and MA
respectively, in May 2005. That August, Katrina came. We
lived in exile for close to six weeks, returning home three
days before my thirty-sixth birthday. I found a new
bartending job. My wife, her university teaching career cut
off at the knees by Katrina, returned to waiting tables. I
went back to work on Fresh Kills, a dark, angry
novella I had started expanding over the summer of '05.
In the novella, I found the bare bones of a plot and a
compelling voice that was fun and cathartic. But my lack of
faith in Staten Island as a setting left the work stunted
and incomplete. I put it down for a while. In grad school, I
took fiction workshops and wrote four stories set on Staten
Island, surprised at how well SI functioned as a stage. I
returned to Fresh Kills with new inspiration and made a
small change in Junior's story. Instead of returning from
exile to bury his father, he had remained on Staten Island.
It gave me key supporting characters such as Molly Francis,
Jimmy McGrath and Carlo Purvis. It gave Junior a recent
history with the island and its people. That change made the
book.
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