Christopher Barzak
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel One for Sorrow which has been made into the Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His third novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, received the Stonewall Honor from the American Library Association and most recently was selected for inclusion on the Human Rights Campaign’s list of books for libraries in LGBTQ welcoming schools. He is also the author of three short story collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies, which won Best Collection in the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards, and Monstrous Alterations. His most recent novel, The Gone Away Place, received the inaugural Whippoorwill Award, and was selected for the Choose to Read Ohio program by the State Library of Ohio, the Ohioana Library Association, and the Ohio Center for the Book.
Christopher grew up in rural Kinsman, Ohio, has lived in the southern California beach town of Carlsbad, and the capital of Michigan; he taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. He teaches creative writing at Youngstown State University, in Youngstown, Ohio.
“Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.”
“I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.”
“The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.”
“As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes.”
“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”
“I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.”
“Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.”