About Todd Petersen

I am an English professor and fiction writer living in southern Utah. I was born in eastern Washington and grew up in Portland, Oregon in the 70s and 80s. I was educated by Jesuits and earned a degree in film (English minor) at the University of Oregon. Through high school and college I spent my summers working at YMCA Camp Silvercreek.

In 1990, I left Oregon for the San Juan Islands. I worked for the YMCA on Orcas Island and in Seattle in various capacities for a little over four years before I left for graduate school in Flagstaff, Arizona. I got my master's degree in creative writing at Northern Arizona University, then earned a PhD in creative writing at Oklahoma State.

Almost everything I'm writing right now deals with a kind of narrative that seems to be everywhere but nameless. I'm calling them convergence and intersection narratives. They are in everything from Lost and Heroes to the films of Jim Jarmusch, the Mexican director/writer team of Innaritu and Arriaga.In the convergence narrative, various characters and plot lines come together, and in the intersection narratives, multiple stories and characters exist in the same time frame and geographical location.

Thematically my writing deals most with contemporary issues in the American West and with matters of faith and belief. I usually shoot for getting both things together in the same room when I can.

I like to geek around with computers and cameras. I also play a little guitar and write songs. During graduate school, I gigged quite a bit, which kept me in groceries. That's tapered off for two reasons: my kids, and the lack of bars in Utah.

About toddpetersen.org

This website is a combination of the now-ubiquitous "weblog" (where I test out ideas for their sea-worthiness) and a general information website about my activities as a writer and man about town who has used thirteen minutes, seventeen seconds of his fifteen minutes of fame.

Mostly this website makes me feel more valorous and swashbuckling than I really am, and it gives me something to do when I am procrastinating besides clean my desk and stick movie clips onto my iPod.