While earning a degree in Philosophy at the University of Florida, I studied fiction writing with Harry Crews, Padgett Powell, and Lawrence Dorr. I eventually headed west where I completed a graduate degree in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I am the author of two novels: Riley’s Blues and Leaving Buchenwald.
The novelist Harry Crews once told me that writing was the closest thing to childbirth that a man can experience. It hurts like hell, but the payoff's incredibly satisfying.
The authors I grew up with--Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain, Nabokov, Harper Lee, Robert Frost, Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene. Of more recent vintage, Mark Helprin, Wallace Stegner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Harry Crews, Padgett Powell, and Lawrence Dorr.
I love Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Master and Margarita, The Heart of the Matter, Lolita, Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories--the list goes on. More comtemporarily, I've been awestruck by Wallace Stegner's The Spectator Bird, Mark Helprin's Memoir from Antproof Case, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. Last, and by no means least, Harry Crews's The Gypsy's Curse and A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Padgett Powell's Edisto, and Lawrence Dorr's collection of fine stories, A Slight Momentary Affliction.
No one has written on Mark D. Ziebart's wall.
No one has written on Mark D. Ziebart's wall.