About Me
I've been writing fiction seriously for the past six years. Fourteen if you count the novel I started and abandoned while studying on a Fulbright in Sri Lanka. Twenty-seven if you count the as-yet-unpublished children's book I penned at the age of nine with my next door neighbor. I'm currently finishing up a short story collection about fathers and terror. Hoping to be hunting for an agent and a publisher later this year.
My parents told me I was named after my Great Grandmother Sarah, whom I never had the privilege of meeting. Sarah, it's said, fled Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century, not to avoid the looming anti-Jewish furor, but to track down her wayward husband, who'd set sail for the States earlier and hadn't called for her yet. My family is nothing if not persistent. Needless to say, Sarah found Max and redomesticated him after all. Of course, my name's Seth, not Sarah, but there's this funny Ashkenazic tradition whereby you name a child using the first letter of the name of a deceased relative. Never a living one. Funny.
I was born just outside of Woodstock, N.Y. a few years too late and grew up in upstate N.Y. But I've also lived in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, New Mexico, and for the past eight years, the California Bay Area, which feels more like home than any other home I've ever had.
I went to Swarthmore for undergrad, married a classmate (years later), and like so many other liberal arts graduates with poorly equipped career planning offices, figured I wanted to be an academic. I did a couple graduate degrees and started a Ph.D. in South and Southeast Asian social history at Harvard, actually in medieval Theravada Buddhist monastic history--I know, not terribly practical. (But neither is fiction writing.) After a few years, I jumped ship. I loved the ancient language study and the research. But I felt so disconnected from the rest of the world.
A series of circuitous turns brought me six years ago to my current day job. I'm self-employed doing international development work in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The important thing for the present purposes is that this is the first time I've had a sustained opportunity to write fiction regularly.
One story from my collection is forthcoming in the Spring 2009 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. Another was recently published in Pearl. A third was a top finalist in a Glimmer Train fiction competition. And several other pieces from the collection are out on submission. I'm also an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
For muses, I have two small and rather opinionated sons.