Bewildering Stories biography and bibliography of David Rogers

Prose Fiction
Seeing Buffalo

Long bio:

The idea of being a writer first entered my head when I was 9 or 10 years old, reading Alcott’s Little Women, in which Jo aspires to be a writer. That story also, I think, implanted in my head the notion that certain challenges were involved in such an undertaking. For instance, writing is one thing. Producing anything others might be interested in is a greater, or at least different, challenge.

Meanwhile, as I grew older, I continued to read an eclectic range of works, from Twain to Tolkien, Asimov to John Ashbery, Poe, Conan Doyle, C. S. Lewis and Sartre and Camus, Homer and Sappho and Shakespeare, James Joyce and Neil Gaiman. When I read Emerson’s observation that what a person thinks about all day is what that person’s life amounts to, I knew what he meant. Books let me live any life I chose, in any age. It was and is an irresistible freedom.

Fast-forward a few decades from my Alcott days, and I found myself haunting the halls of a university, where I blundered into a creative writing class. There I was told I should focus my energies on writing poems rather than fiction, as I exhibited some talent for the former enterprise but not much for the latter. This was helpful advice, because I was perfectly willing to believe I had potential as a poet, and also strongly inclined to attempt anything I was told not to do. So ambitions toward fiction writing were strengthened.

Fortunately, Emily Dickinson taught me there is some great power in using few words to tell a really big story, and the line between poems and fiction is at times delightfully blurry. Thus I developed a new appreciation for the art of the short story as well as poems and novels.

Somewhere along the line, I read Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. It was the first book by King that I had read, but it was enough to start me reading just about everything else he wrote. Thereafter, I learned that many still frown upon King as somehow being unliterary and therefore unworthy. Some frowners included ones who had dismissed my early, inept attempts to write fiction. I was not sure what that coincidence meant, but I felt sure it meant something.

Fast-forward a few more decades, through many years of graduate school and teaching college English--one does, after all, need to make a living--and poems published in various journals and magazines. Meanwhile, I found time and inspiration to continue fictionalizing in prose.

In 2018, the Wisconsin college literary journal Straylight published one of my stories, “Doors.” In that story, Sam takes a job guarding the entrance to what he believes is an abandoned warehouse, but which of course turns out to be something far stranger. Straylight paid only in copies (albeit actual printed, paper copies, mailed, astonishingly enough, through the US Postal Service), but the experience was very encouraging.

Further submissions here and there have demonstrated not only that some readers like what I write, but also that certain publishers pay actual dollars for stories I made up. Such people have included the editors of the Third Flatiron series, Daily Science Fiction, and the Page and Spine website. Trust me, I still find this fact as amazing and gratitude-inducing as sunrise.

The stories others have found worthy of their time are collected in Emergency Exits (available on Amazon, print or ebook). My sources tell me Stephen King remains untroubled by the prospect that I will unseat him from his position at the tops of bestseller lists.

Nevertheless, I write what I like, and continue to be grateful if anyone else likes it, too. A few more of the things I have written (or links thereto) may be found at Davidrogersbooks.wordpress.com and Davidrogersbooks.com. Currently, I am experiencing the marvels that have sprung from the mind of N. K. Jemison, of whom I stand increasingly in awe.

I live on one-half acre of wilderness somewhere in the vicinity of Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, and tweet on Twitter @Davidrogersbook.

David Rogers

Bewildering Stories biography

Bewildering Stories bibliography