Posted By BillHeise on February 20, 2009

That’s a great question and I’m glad you asked. I was born in Chicago in 1962. I went to grammar school in Northbrook,  IL. My parents moved to Glencoe IL when I was 12 years old. That experience so disoriented me that I never managed to study even once during all my time in high school. (I’m seriously, you guys.)  But  I managed to make a few friends, all of whom I lost contact with for the next 25 years. But thanks to Facebook, I’m in touch with them again.

After high school, I managed to break out of Glencoe. In fact, I broke a whole lot of things. I managed to fail out of Ripon College in Ripon Wisconsin, and this began my on-again off-again relationship with higher education. Being a perpetual failure through my high school years, I vowed I would never to go back to college. I worked my way through a series of low-paying jobs until I got a job working at a bank, but after four years of living on my own I decided that I was ready to go back to college. So I applied and was accepted to Northern Illinois University.

My time as an undergraduate at Northern Illinois was the only happy time I ever had in college. So I decided to go to graduate school, and this was the beginning of my long “off-again” relationship with higher education.

About two years before I graduated with my PhD from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, I realized that, although I loved studying literature, I was not temperamentally suited for life in academia. I decided to finish my PhD for three reasons. The first was that I was actually interested in my subject, the influence of logic on medieval allegory. (Yeah, I know. How fun am I?) The second reason was more cynical. I realized that with that I could make a better living than without it. But to be fair, the third reason was probably the most immediate. I realized that I had no other job skills.

I have had a conversation with my friend Jim Marchand one day in which he told me that his daughter was a freelance computer systems analyst. I asked him a whole bunch of questions about her work that day, and when I got out of college I started to pursue that goal for myself.

It was slow going at first, but after only four years of working I had managed to land myself my first freelance job as a computer programmer and systems analyst. Nice, I thought.

While there were some ups and downs in that profession, I was generally happier in it than I had been in academia itself. But then, on August 1, 2004, I had a sudden stroke. I was in the hospital for five weeks, and outpatient rehab for five months. I had to learn to walk again from scratch. But I’ve never really been a body guy. I was much more disturbed about the loss of my mental faculties (more on that in a future post). I slowly regained those through two years of hard, hard labor. Now I can talk, and no one but me usually notices that I’m having a hard time speaking.

So after two years, I managed to get my driver’s license back. The next day I went and asked for my old teaching job back. It took three weeks for them to approve me—largely because I can’t actually write with my right hand anymore (stroke after-effects)—but eventually they did. So I went back to work teaching college English.

And I began to write, partly as therapy and partly because I had things to say. It’s amazing how a small thing like a stroke can concentrate the mind. Thus far I’ve written two novels to completion, and two novels that are about halfway through. I decided to get serious about my project for teaching writing to people hate writing. The book, which will come out this August or September, is entitled Writing for People Who Hate Writing.

Well, that it for introductions. This blogging is a lot of work, so I think I will call it a day.

Categories: Personal
Tags: bio, boigraphy, William Heise