Earl L Carlson was born by the light of a kerosene lamp in a small logging community in northern Minnesota, just fifty miles up a dirt road from the nearest public library.
During the school year, he had access to a number of books judged suitable for students. So he read The Three Musketeers, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Drums Along the Mohawk. A drug store in the next town carried paperback novels, usually twenty-five cents a copy, facilitating his introduction to John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, and Thorne Smith. And he had a subscription to Boys’ Life (to which, at the age of twelve, he submitted his first story, hand-written in a spiral notebook). But he wouldn’t discover Dostoevsky, Henry James, Lafcadio Hearne, Voltaire, Aldous Huxley, H. L. Mencken, and the many others who influenced his inclinations and writing style, until he ventured out into the wider world.
Over the years, he beat the living hell out of several secondhand typewriters, none of which seemed capable of completing an error-free page. But it wasn’t until he bought his first computer in 1988 that he enjoyed the luxury of concentrating on his writing rather than the arduous business of typing.
For a time, he produced a humorous newsletter for an organization called the Society of Dirty Old Men, which they hoped would make them all filthy rich selling T-shirts and souvenirs to college students. Following the demise of that brave new venture, he turned to short stories, novellas, and novels. Though he has sold stories to several magazines and journals, both print and electronic, and published two collections of his stories, he has also managed to accumulate an awe-inspiring collection of rejection slips.
He is still waiting for a response from Boys’ Life
