A Brief Bio

Suitable for Snap Judgments, as of December 2009

Micah Nathan’s debut novel “Gods of Aberdeen” (Simon & Schuster 2005) was published in six countries and became an international bestseller. His award-winning essays and short stories have appeared in Bellingham Review, Diagram, Boston Globe Magazine, Eclectica, Commonweal, and other national publications. His short fiction has been a finalist for the Tobias Wolff Award and the Innovative Fiction Award, and in 2006 he co-authored a horror screenplay for Dimension Films. Micah is currently a teaching fellow at Boston University’s MFA program, and his second novel “Memphis is Burning” will be published by Random House in 2011.  While waiting for that auspicious date Micah keeps himself busy in his Holliston, Massachusetts home. Often at the expense of his eternally-patient wife, their terrifyingly intelligent German Short-Haired Pointer, and future children who are taking their sweet time arriving.

A Longer Bio

Suitable for Killing Time at Work

I’ll start with where I grew up. The town of Boston, New York, a once-quaint farming community now slowly succumbing to the sprawl of duplexes and McMansions. Beer is still $1.50 at the local bar—and it goes perfect with a kettle of deep-fried crayfish known as lobster dainties —but the farms are being sold off and the pioneering suburbanites chop down every tree on their property. There’s still a lot of country in the Boston hills; spruce-covered ravines and slate-bed creeks and the smell of manure in the spring. But it’s changing, and I don’t like it.

In college I hosted Misinformation , a weekly talk show advertised as a mix of political satire (or what we believed to be political satire) and juvenile humor. Misinformation lasted for three years at 91.3 WBNY, an 800 watt station in Buffalo, New York. The show was started by Dave Blaustein, and I was his co-host for the first two years until he left for a big-time radio job in ABC’s entertainment division.

(For the few of you who remember our shows, Dave was the one responsible for Male Transvestite Mechanics . He wrote the whole damn thing, and produced it, and all I did was laugh while eating the chicken caesar bread bowl at Perkins Restaurant.)

The motivational speaking tour is a separate tale, best told over dinner. Simply put, at the age of 21 I fell into a post-breakup depression and decided the only way out of it was to become a motivational speaker. I had two gigs—one at the Barnes & Noble on Niagara Falls Boulevard in Buffalo, and the second at Charleston College in Charleston. The first gig was well-attended by a mix of friends and family and a handful of strangers who’d wandered in from the self-help section. The second gig had four audience members. All four were the audio/visual guys who set up my slide presentation. My career as America’s Youngest Motivational Speaker ended as it began: with a late night revelation that I could be doing something better.

Fast forward twelve years. Past marriage and my first novel and on to my first screenwriting job. I wrote a horror flick for a mid-level L.A. production company with a few A-listers attached. They flew me in, put me in a Best Western suite, and had me write the script in seven days. The story was adequate–my favorite scene involved a 12-foot crucifix coming to life, Jesus writhing and dripping black blood that turned to beetles when it hit the floor–and I spent many late nights eating Jell-O with the director and going over rewrites. Then, as screenplays are wont to do once in the hands of producers, it disappeared. The mid-level L.A. production company also disappeared, and the A-list director moved on to better things and I’m guessing better scripts. Or maybe not. These things happen over there.

What else. I’ve filmed a crime/zombie movie. Calling it “low budget” is an understatement. The experiment was seeing what we could do with five hundred bucks. It turned out decent enough–no worse than movies with 10,000 times the budget. Well, maybe a little worse. While on tour in Milan in support of the Italian release of Gods of Aberdeen , a journalist told me it was odd that I, a “serious writer,” enjoy zombie movies. She may have meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. Genre be damned–all art falls under the all-important genre of entertainment. If it educates or inspires or angers, all the better. But let’s not kid ourselves. We read certain prose and watch certain movies and listen to certain music and stare at certain paintings because it’s fun. Within that hierarchy, Ed Wood and Nabokov sit on the same bus. Ridiculous, I know. But true.

So where am I now? In Holliston, MA, lying on my couch, writing in my shorts and socks. From my window I can see the lake, where I’m told there’s excellent fishing but I don’t have the heart to hook a fish. I miss the city but am growing accustomed to the lack of particulate matter on our windowsills, and I still–still!–have not seen the last season of Battlestar Galactica.

Update: Finally watched the last season of BG. Final episode complaints aside, what more could you ask for?

November 20, 2009