The Author

I grew up next to a fire-station on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I remember watching many sunsets to the sound of a wailing siren. To this day I find the sound of sirens comforting. Our family ultimately moved upstate and my brother and I spent the next few years running around the woods like little monkeys. We carry scars to this day left by battling each other with sticks.

I started writing back then, sending a synopsis to Marvel comics when I was 12. It came back with red pen marks from one of their editors. I was overjoyed to see evidence that someone had read it. His last line was “Very impressive presentation- but if you have a word processor, use it. There are too many typos.”

I wound up in Europe for high school, getting good grades but climbing down a rope from my dorm room on a regular basis to meet up with my friends for mischief in empty barns on moonlit Alpen meadows. After snow and Swiss chocolate, enjoyed all the while with a shaved head and steel cap boots, I went to art school in Chicago.

In Chicago I learned to paint. I also took a writing class taught by David Sedaris. The first class he had us all write our names in crayon on colored construction paper leaves and pin them to our shirts. I almost walked out. But even in my teenage delirium I knew this was something to stick around for.

My junior year brought me to Germany. My alcoholic painting professor in Berlin said he hoped there was no problem with my German because there were already so many problems with my paintings. The next week he came back, having forgot he said any of this, and praised everything.

Having broken up with my German girlfriend and needing an escape route I ended up in San Francisco with my brother. There I created art for video games for several years, living the life of a charlatan since I never played video games.

Together with a girl I met in Sausalito I escaped to Los Angeles. We got married in Santorini, Greece in a suite where you could dive into the pool from the bedroom and swim outside to a view of the caldera. It rained for our outdoor reception dinner but everyone said this boded well for our marriage.

In Los Angeles I wrote and directed a few short films before discovering I was a born Production Designer. Something that, unlike working on video games, came completely naturally to me as though I’d been doing it my whole life. But I still found myself writing stories whenever I had a minute: un-belabored bursts directly from my subconscious mind. I created the very short fiction blog so I could do one every day and be reminded of what creativity should be, when you get your head out of it and just go.

-Tom Lisowski

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