Larry Woiwode

Biography
Born in 1941, Larry Woiwode lived in Sykeston until the age of eight, when his family moved to Illinois. He started writing in high school and continued to write throughout his college days at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He pursued his writing career in New York City, where his work appeared in The Atlantic, GQ, Harpers, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and other publications, including two dozen stories in The New Yorker. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 1995, for "Distinction in the Art of the Short Story," and has appeared in four volumes of Best American Short Stories. He has been awarded the Aga Khan Prize, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a 1992 Rough Rider Award, and in 1995 was named poet laureate of North Dakota.

His books include What I'm Going To Do, I Think (his first novel, and recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award and a notable book award from the American Library Association; Beyond the Bedroom Wall (a finalist for the National Book Award and Book Critics Circle Award), Indian Affairs, Silent Passengers, Eventide, Neumiller Stories, Poppa John, Born Brothers, What I Think I Did (named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, as five of his other books have been) and, most recently Aristocrat of the West: The Story of Harold Schafer.

He has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; was a full professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and was the director of its Creative Writing Program. He has conducted writing seminars and workshops across the United States and abroad, including the C. S. Lewis Summer Seminars at Cambridge and U.S. State Department tours of the provinces of Canada and of Lithuania and Scandinavia.

Larry and his wife, Carole, moved back to North Dakota in 1978 and reside on their 160-acre farm near Mott in the southwestern corner of the state.

What I Think I Did.

In What I Think I Did, Larry Woiwode does two things at once: he survives the winter of 1996, the worst in North Dakota 's history, and tells the story of his beginnings as a writer, especially the early days at The New Yorker leading up to the publication of his first book, What I'm Going to Do, I Think. "Act One" revolves around the purchase, installation, and feeding of a giant wood-burning furnace to heat Woiwode's farm through that winter's record snow and cold. These acts form a central metaphor for exploring the sources of his writer's craft and for pulling together the threads of his boyhood and family life. "Act Two" recounts his university life and early New York days, his beginning a writing career, and his friendship with the young Robert DeNiro. The material on the late William Maxwell, of The New Yorker, is riveting. More than almost any other writer, Woiwode has the capacity to astound with his words. In this memoir, he is at the top of his form.

Website Links:

New Hampshire Writers Project Write-Up of Woiwode
www.nhwritersproject.org/poetryandpolitics/ woiwode .htm

Woiwode's Rough Rider Award
www.governor.state.nd.us/awards/rr-gallery/ woiwode .html

Dickinson State University Webpage Devoted to Woiwode
http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/langlit/
SeniorProjects/North%20Dakota
%20Authors%20Pub1/page17.html