A Short Bio, Written in 3rd Person

The view from Rasmussen's teacher desk

There are a few notable Eric Rasmussens out there - a professional baseball player, a Shakespeare scholar, a Bay Area reporter (not clear on which bay), a hockey player, and many more. This particular Eric Rasmussen has taught high school English for ten years in Western Wisconsin. He's not one of those boring, traditional English teachers. Sure, he can analyze the hell out of the symbols in Catcher in the Rye, but he's more interested in film, advertising, and the ways in which we communicate and tell stories in the modern world. Because he gets to discuss mumbo-jumbo like that with rooms full of juniors and seniors, he likes his job.

At the start of his teaching career, he decided he would write a novel someday, because he had not yet learned that cliches are bad. Every six months he would put a few words on a page, and was on pace to finish his first manuscript by the time he was 137 years old, until something clicked and he got serious. In two years, he finished four novels. Through the first three (Oppurntyville, Gravity Lessens, and There's Always Something on Squaw Lake), he made many connections with other writers in real life and over the internet, and several literary agents. In early 2016, he began querying #4, Nicer Than Mr. Garrity, and hope abounds that this effort will earn him representation and publishing success. In 2015, he also started playing the short story game, and has stories forthcoming in Souvenir Lit Journal and Mulberry Fork Review.

The aforementioned Eric, with ducks

Some might say the pace of his writing is starting to come across as a little desperate. Eric prefers "manically motivated." He will start a low-residency MFA program in summer 2016, if there was any doubt left of his seriousness about all this.

He has written extensively for Volume One magazine, a local alt-weekly, for over a decade. He has published work in local newspapers, Wisconsin People and Ideas, his college creative writing journal, and other places, just enough to make him think that writing professionally might not be that far fetched. He has two kids, a fantastic wife, a cat he doesn't care for, and this blog. As far as Eric Rasmussens go, he's not too
bad.