Tom Spanbauer

The Archive Project

This episode is a celebration of the life of writer and teacher Tom Spanbauer, who passed away on September 21, 2024.    

Born in rural Idaho in 1946, Spanbauer spent time in Kenya in the Peace Corps after attending Idaho State University. He returned to the United States in 1978 and moved several times before landing in New York City, where he earned an MFA from Columbia University 1988. He published his first novel Faraway Places a year later at the age of 43.     

In 1991, Spanbauer moved to Portland, where he was part of a collection of writers and artists sho shaped the cultural identity and life of the city for decades to come. He did this through his five critically acclaimed novels, and through his radically influential teaching, a critic group he led for nearly three decades called Dangerous Writers, which birthed the careers of dozens of writers. 

The episode features two sperate recordings of and about Tom Spanbauer. The first is a conversation with Suzy Vitello, one of his students, from the 2015 Portland Book Festival, then called Wordstock, and the second is from that same year when he won Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award at the Oregon Book Awards. 

Tom Spanbauer was the critically acclaimed author and founder of Dangerous Writing. His five published novels Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, In The City Of Shy Hunters, Now Is The Hour, and I Loved You More (Hawthorne Books, April 2014), are notable for their combination of a fresh and lyrical prose style with solid storytelling. His introductory workshop is an underground legend among emerging writers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Spanbauer passed away in September 2024.