Novelist, teacher, and Dangerous Writing founder Tom Spanbauer dies at 78 (Kenya)
I met Tom Spanbauer a couple of years after moving to Portland, Oregon in the late 1990s. I didn't learn…
Tom Spanbauer (Kenya 1969-71) author of The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon and I Loved you More, died September 21, in Portland, following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Spanbauer was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1946. After waiting tables while earning his MFA from Columbia University in 1988, he served two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya, then lived across the United States before moving to Portland in 1991, shortly after publication of his cult classic The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon. His other novels include Faraway Places, In the City of Shy Hunters, I Loved You More, and Now Is the Hour. His books explore issues of race, sexual identity, and making a family of choice.
In Portland, he founded the Dangerous Writing workshop from his home. The workshop, which spanned three decades, left a line of enthusiastic students.
“It is a terrifying thing to bring your inner life out of the closet and read it aloud to a group,” Spanbauer wrote about teaching workshops. “I must listen for the heartbreak, the rage, the shame, the fear that is hidden within the words. Then I must respect where each individual student is in relation to his or her broken heart and act accordingly.”
Friends and students of Spanbauer, whose exuberant life inspired many, took to Facebook this week to express their thoughts of their mentor. Portland writer Brian S. Ellis, who joined the Dangerous Writers workshop in 2015, wrote he was devastated at Spanbauer’s loss. Best-selling author Chelsea Cain noted, “He impacted so so many of us. His teaching live[s] on in so many forms, passed along generations.”
Portland author and actor Srephen Rutledge wrote: “Portland seems to me to have been a perfect spot for Spanbauer to write and teach, and he was much loved by the city’s literary and artistic communities. He created the concept of ‘dangerous writing,’ a technique he taught with this philosophy: ‘… To learn to speak your truth honestly with a clear voice takes lots of practice, and every trick in the book to keep you going down the arduous, cruel, lonely, glorious path of a writer.’”
Spanbauer was as awarded as he was locally celebrated for his literature. He won the 1992 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for best fiction. In 2015, he received a Lambda Literary Award for Gay General Fiction for I Loved You More, as well as the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award from Literary Arts.
In a Facebook post, Ricci paid tribute to his “beloved husband, best friend, and literary talent.”
“Tom leaves behind so much,” Ricci wrote. “His gifts to the world through his writing and teaching are uncountable, measured only by the vast number of students and readers around the world who he let inside his brilliant mind and his unending capacity to map out his, and by extension, our, human heart. I am wrecked. After 22 years together, and all the difficulties of his ongoing and progressive illnesses, we were still always falling in love. I don’t know what I did in some past life to deserve the devotion and love of this wondrous, tender, glorious man. He will always be my husband and my heart.”
I met Tom Spanbauer a couple of years after moving to Portland, Oregon in the late 1990s. I didn’t learn that he was an author until I Googled him a year or two later. And I didn’t realize he was a RPCV until reading this obituary. My encounter with Tom came about when I bought his well-loved 1949 Chevy 1/2 ton pickup in 1999. It was a beautiful truck, and Tom said he was getting rid of all of his toys because he was dying. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but it made bargaining rather difficult. So I paid him the $2,500 he was asking, and enjoyed the truck for the next 20 years. A few years later, I was invited by Tom’s partner Michael to at least one public gathering where Tom read from one of his novels. Even later. I remember being deeply moved by reading Spanbauer’s powerful book, “I Loved You More”. Thanks for filling in that blanks with this timely notice of his death.