Author Tom Spanbauer, best known for his cult classic, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, and his award-winning final novel, I Loved You More, as well as his long-running Dangerous Writing workshop, died September 21 at age 78.
Born in Pocatello, Idaho, he attended Idaho State University and Columbia, and was also a member of the Peace Corps in Kenya. He returned to Idaho until 1978, when he moved to New Hampshire, then Vermont, then Key West, Fla. Eventually he landed on the Lower East Side of New York, where he began writing stories. He earned his MFA at Columbia University in 1988.
As a gay man in 1980s Key West and New York, he outlived the AIDS epidemic and detailed its devastation in his third novel, In the City of Shy Hunters, a story he believed it was his solemn duty to tell, but was much bigger than sickness.
"Shy Hunters is as much about AIDS as Romeo and Juliet is about teen suicide," he wrote. "Shy Hunters is the story of a man searching for his lost love in a world that has gone mad, but it is also an homage to my beloved New York City and to try to tell of the days of the plague and the horror that gay men went through." His other books include Faraway Places and Now Is the Hour.
In 2002, at a Ghost Dance in Wolf Creek, Ore., he met Michael Sage Ricci, who would be his spouse and partner of 22 years. Ricci said that Spanbauer's stories "have always been about him finding family, finding the characters of his heart, and he created such families. All those queer kids who had no family, he gave them (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon's) Shed and Ida and all of those characters."
Spanbauer's impact on the literary world reached far beyond the pages of his books, influencing a lineage of writers and students who continue to publish, teach, and pass on his philosophy and language.
In 1991, shortly after the publication of The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, he moved to Portland, Ore., where he began teaching Dangerous Writing at his dining room table. The workshop continued for more than 25 years in his home and around the world.
The Dangerous Writing workshops produced hundreds of writers who consider what they learned to be "basement table MFAs." More than 50 of his students went on to publish novels and memoirs, most famously Chuck Palanuik, who wrote Fight Club and Invisible Monsters during his five years in the workshop.
Spanbauer won the 2015 Lambda Literary Award in the gay general fiction category for I Loved You More. The same year, he won the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, from Literary Arts in Oregon. He was also the winner of the 1992 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for best fiction.
In one of his last essays, Spanbauer wrote: "Given all the weirdness of being raised in rural Idaho in the '50s, though, I've got to say that walking the mile home after changing the water (irrigating) on a summer evening--that long solitary walk at sunset down the dusty roads through the sugar beet fields, the alfalfa fields, the barley and wheat fields, was something close to a miracle. Really the connection I felt to the sky and to the earth and to the water created in me a feeling of being connected to an abiding deep mystery.
"Idaho: such an enigma. But isn't that what home is?
"The dreaded place where your heart sings."
