I am a native of Santa Monica, California. I attended UCLA as an undergraduate and received a master's degree from New York University. In 1991 my writing won me a position in a writer's workshop at the University of New York at Albany's Writers Institute, founded, and at the time led by William Kennedy, where I studied under the guidance of Irish author John Montague.

I have been a lifetime reader and writer and once had an unpublished novel presented to Director Paul Verhoeven for a film adaptation. Up until the publication of my collection of short stories, "Stories from The Last Basin" (which I will be serializing on Medium, is available on Amazon if you would like a physical copy!), that was the highlight of my writing career.

Time brings change, and a serious illness led to an earlier than expected retirement. With the onset of Covid, I began a major reading of modernist fiction along with past and current criticism. This led to a dramatic change in the way I perceived the post-modern fiction I had grown up with and from which I thought I drew much of my writing influence. I found myself less interested in plot and far more interested in character, so much so that after creating a set of characters and a setting, I let my characters and their interactions lead me to story, more often than not surprising me with the direction they took and the conclusions they reached. Not everyone writes this way, but for me, it finally revealed my true voice as an author.

In addition to serializing my short stories, I will be writing about the art of fiction, reviewing some important books that I found crucial in my development as a writer, and simply publishing some of my journal entries, which are simple exercises in writing and that I hope will encourage you to write more. There are a limitless number of subjects, anyone of which can be developed into an interesting and often enjoyable short reflection on life.

I can be contacted at johnanthony.medium@aol.com.