Memoir.Autobiography. Twenty years old--and with a summer of working on oceangoing merchant ships under my belt--already a dropout, I headed with a friend to a tar-paper shack in country north of the town where our college was located--this was in central New York state--where we intended to go Thoreau. Thus begins Michael Gregory Stephens' account of his brief foray out of the world of commerce and corner stores and into a rugged and chilly Walden. This deftly-written memoir gives Stephens, author of more than 15 books including GREEN DREAMS: ESSAYS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the opportunity not only to reminisce about his post-college days, but also to ruminate on the impulses that initially led him to the ill-fated tar-paper shack, and the possibilities for going Thoreau even in a setting as urban as New York City. Perfectbound chapbook.

Author City: London ENG

M.G. Stephens is the author of eighteen books, including the novels The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole; the play OUR FATHER, which was revived last year in London; and the nonfiction books Lost in Seoul, Green Dreams, and Where the Sky Ends. Mick lives in London, is the director of the MA in creative writing at Kingston University in Surrey, England, and is finishing up a PhD thesis on the St. Mark's in the Bowery Poetry Project and its influences at the University of Essex in Colchester, England. His essay is drawn from that thesis. Some of his other recent work includes essays and stories in Witness, Boston Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Foreign Policy. He recently completed the third novel in the Coole family saga, this new one called Kid Coole, and has been writing a book of sonnets for several years now, as well as writing a nonfiction book about living in England after 9/11, and also surviving one of the tube explosions on July 7, 2005, being on the train in front of where the Edgware Road bomb went off.