How Are you going To finD someone wiTH some goofy reAson To publisH your book if you Don’T knock on 10,000 Doors? David Michael Slater
A local middle school teacher is also an author. Two of his dozens of books are on their second release.
D
avid Michael Slater is an author of dozens of books and an English teacher at Pine Middle School. He never planned on being either, but he’s been teaching and writing books for close to 20 years. Now he’s an author in motion. The New York Journal of Books likened him to David Sedaris, and he’s awaiting a second run of his teen fantasy series, The Forbidden Books, and his adult dark comedy novel, Fun and Games, by Zharmae Publishing Press. He’s thinking of developing his teen series for the big screen. Slater said he got where he is now because of a love of words, an obsession with the works of the legendary Argentine poet and author Jorge Luis Borges, and several instances of “smart luck.” Born in Pittsburgh in 1970, he was never one for having a plan. Even now, he never outlines his work before he writes. He composes and revises his words as they come to him. “I think I wanted to be a soccer player,” said Slater. “But not once I got into college, no.” He earned a degree in something called “organizational psych.” As a junior at the University of Michigan, Slater spent a year abroad in Australia, where, on a whim, he wrote the beginnings of a play on the back of a magazine in an airport
David Michael Slater teaches English at Pine Middle School and writes books for kids, teens and adults.
16
|
RN&R
|
07.28.16
sTory AnD pHoTo by mATT bieker van. The resulting Gods and Cats was his take on the absurdist style of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a high school favorite he had rediscovered in college. The script eventually won a local theater competition and was produced in its entirety. “That was the first thing I’d ever written and the first thing I’d ever produced,” said Slater. “So I got the wrong impression of how easy this was going to be, to write.” Slater went to the University of Pittsburgh to complete a full year of English courses in order to change his major. In 1993, his plan to pursue a doctorate in English took him to his first, and only, year at Carnegie Mellon University, where the extra reading section of a class syllabus introduced him to the works of Borges, known in the 20th century for his multi-dimensional works of fiction. His magical realism has heavily influenced Slater’s style. “A lot of my books—there’s a vein of absurdity in them,” said Slater. “But what really unifies all of my work is a love of words, a play with words. Even my teen fantasy series, where there really is no absurdity, they’re all books about books. There’s some sort of magic to the words, and that’s Borgesian. Every single one of them starts with a Borges quote in them.”
