Norman Green

Biography

Norman Green reports this about himself:

A biography? As that great philosopher John McEnroe once said, ‘you can’t be serious.’ It’s the books I want you to be interested in, not me…

All right, enough evasion. I am your basic American mongrel, son of a father who seemed happiest when he was behind the wheel of a U-Haul truck. I was born in Massachusetts and grew up in various parts of New England. I went to high school in the late sixties and early seventies, learned mostly that I didn’t like school. I must have inherited some of my father’s gypsy spirit, because I left home shortly after school with little idea of who I was or where I was going.

I was in Brooklyn, New York in ‘76 when I married a wonderful girl (took her hostage, some might say). I didn’t stay too long in New York, not that time, anyway.

In the years since, my restless, irritable and discontented nature has taken me from one place to another and from one career to another. May you lead an interesting life, so goes the ancient Chinese curse, and mine has not been boring. I may be one of those people who has trouble distinguishing fear from exhilaration. In lieu of 401k’s and IRA’s, I have a lot of stories…

It’s not something I thought about ahead of time, not a path I would recommend to anyone, but it is one of the more common ways to grow a novelist, as traditional, in its own way, as the Iowa Writer’s Project.

The tuition is a bitch, though.