My work as a novelist and fiction writer is not as well known as my work as a poet. I have written a number of short stories but published only one, Hilda.  My first historical novel, The Plymouth Papers, I am pleased to say, has been published by Spout Hill Press.

In the eighties I wrote three novels. None was published till 2000, and it is an understatement to say they were not bestsellers, although all were favorably reviewed. Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers, a frankly autobiographical novel about my older brother and me, got the most attention and garnered me an invitation to appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA on a panel of gay writers along with Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla and Noel Alumit, whose fine first novels, Ode to Lata and Letters to Montgomery Clift, I was pleased to review for the International Gay and Lesbian Review.

Loud Whisper is about an eighties punk rock/new age band whose bisexual, addict frontman falls from the stage and is paralyzed. The novel is about his struggle to get well physically and spiritually.

Bare Roots is my coming-of-age/coming out novel about a boy who moves from Wisconsin to southern California after his mother divorces his father.

Having discovered through a third cousin who shares my interest in family history that I am descended from Mayflower passengers, I set out to prove this lineage sufficiently to be accepted by the Mayflower Society. After some research at its headquarters in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and a delightful visit to nearby Plimouth Plantation, where I talked with people impersonating my 10th great grandparents, and after reading nearly every book on the topic I could get my hands on and researching the historical records, including those of the Wampanoag Indians, from whom I am also descended through my 9th great grandfather, Giles Hopkins, who married a half-Wampanoag woman, I wrote a novel called The Plymouth Papers while on a fellowship at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM, in 2004. After several revisions of the manuscript, The Plymouth Papers has now been published by Spout Hill Press.

PAGE LAST REVISED: 15 February 2014

--Copyright Clifton Snider, 2010. All rights reserved.