G.F. Michelsen

A writer’s bio should be irrelevant; what counts are the people in his books, the stories that surround them, and how the reader rebuilds them into his or her personal vision of the world. That being said, we live in a society that focuses on the individual in order to distract from a greater impotence at the macrocosmic level; in this way, the perceived glitz and power of fame, however marginal, distract from the humdrum side of our own lives. Can the affairs of J.Lo compensate for unpaid bills or job-related stress? No matter. Since I am trying to get people to read my books by any means possible, figuring, like any autocrat, that the benefits of reading good novels will ultimately outweigh the means by which that end is attained, I am willing to pander to even these unhealthy tendencies. Therefore:

G.F. Michelsen is the author of 12 published novels, several written under pseudonym, as well as one non-fiction book. The fiction titles under his name include Blues for Nansen, To Sleep With Ghosts, Hard Bottom, The Art and Practice of Explosion, and (to be published in August, 2007) Mettle. (See reviews page.)

He was born in Cape Cod, the site of many of his novels; an upcoming trilogy of novels is also set on-Cape.

Michelsen, who holds a 100-ton master’s license from the U.S. Coast Guard, has worked as an officer on coastal freighters in the British merchant navy, and has captained fishing boats out of Chatham, Mass. He keeps his hand in matters maritime by working on friends’ fishing boats and sailing on a family sloop. He has also worked as an underground laborer in subway tunnels, an extrusion-machine operator in an English plastics factory, and--most proudly--as chief transporter of cream-puff biscuits in a cookie plant.

He has been an investigative reporter, writer, and/or editor for the Cape Cod Register, the Cape Cod Times, Commercial Fisheries News, the International Herald Tribune, and Business Week magazine. His articles, reviews, and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Harper’s, Men’s Journal, and the Notre Dame Review. He has spent most of his adult life in southeastern Massachusetts, fishing, writing, drinking, chopping wood, and sometimes getting into trouble that his lawyer, if he had one, would advise him not to talk about. He spends too much time in New York at this point. He is really not as pompous and self-satisfied as this bio would imply.

Michelsen teaches creative writing at New York University, where he does in fact learn more from his students than they learn from him. Oh yeah, he got an education, somehow; at France’s Sciences Po, at the London School of Economics, and at Bennington College. He has two kids, Emilie and Alexandre, who are much more interesting and talented than he is but don’t yet have a web site to prove it. His wife, Liz, is a fine artist and photo editor. They have a cat, Pippin; if they weren’t so peripatetic they’d get a dog too. Michelsen splits his time between the Cape and New York. He uses the Lucky Star Chinese bus a lot.