RS Deeren is the author of Enough to Lose: Stories. He received his MFA from Columbia College Chicago and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. He was the 2016 Union League Club of Chicago Library's Writer in Residence and a 2015 Luminarts Cultural Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. The title story to Enough to Lose has been anthologized in Tales of Two Americas edited by John Freeman. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appears in The Great Lakes Review, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. He is from rural Michigan, where he worked as a line cook, a substitute teacher, a landscaper, a banker, and a lumberjack. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Hey there, this is RS. Thanks a ton for perusing my website and taking in some of the words I've put down over the years.
I'm originally from the Thumb Region of Michigan, a three-county peninsula on the state's Lower Peninsula. When I lived in Chicago an old friend visiting asked, "I suppose you won't be coming back home, will you?" I didn't have an answer at the time but if I were a little quicker on my feet, I'd have told my friend that small town Michigan (a city named Caro) will always be "home." As a writer, I believe that home is where the stories come from. It's the mine deep inside of you that you dig into to get the words and stories only you can write.
The characters populating my stories are river people, farm people, women and men with their backs to the water and the outside world kept an hour's drive away. They are home, for better or worse, and as the 21st Century creeps in, they see that home is something that they need to carry with them. So, since my characters are all parts of me, I, too, am carrying home with me. In short, and in many ways, it's like I've never left.
Happy Reading, Happy Writing
RS