

Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His recently published story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2009, Narrative, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar, among other publications. From 2008-2010, he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and, in October, will begin a Charles Pick Fellowship at UEA. He’s working on a novel in addition to the memoir from which this excerpt is taken