From Shelf Awareness Thursday, October 3, 2024:
Tom Spanbauer
Obituary Note: Tom Spanbauer
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. He was 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.
For more about Spanbauer, a beloved figure in the literary community and a 1992 Pacific Northwest Book Award winner, please click for the full Shelf Awareness article.
