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Michael Shilling

Biography

Michael Shilling

Michael Shilling grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and after graduating from NYU, moved to Seattle. There, he worked as a copywriter in the first .com wave, wrote arts criticism for The Stranger - the city's alternative weekly - and wrote two "practice" novels. He also played the drums in numerous bands of varying degrees of local success, ranging from the can't-buy-a-gig prog-rock outfit called Sonica, to the Biggest Local Band of 1998 status of the Western State Hurricanes. However, from 2001-2004 he played in The Long Winters, who established a respectable national profile that grows to this day, and toured with bands such as Death Cab For Cutie. After leaving The Long Winters, he turned his energy to short stories, and eventually three of them found homes in The Sun, Fugue, and Other Voices. In 2005, and with the dubious agreement of his wife, the two moved to Ann Arbor so he could attend the University of Michigan, where he earned his MFA in Creative Writing and now teaches in the English Department. He is currently working on a novel that takes place in England during the late 1820s, a drama that he describes, roughly, as Jane Eyre meets The Wire.

As far as the books that have most influenced him, Michael points to three: The White Album by Joan Didion, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and The Dirt by Motley Crue.

Michael Shilling

Books by Michael Shilling