I'm 53, and it's hard to believe that anyone could possibly care about where I was born, but for the sake of due diligence, it was in Queens, NY. I grew up in Upper Nyack, a suburb of New York City, without a lot of drama, and the most important thing I learned in my four years at Middlebury College in Vermont was that I could write in James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style fluently and for long periods of time without breaking a sweat. That was also the very first time I dabbled in fiction, though I wasn't aware of it at the time, only that I was having fun.