About Stefan
Like all men of letters, I began writing in order to get girls. I wrote my first story in the second grade, and although “The Coxornie” was luminous with literary promise (it concerned a monster who emerged from the center of the earth), it failed in its secret purpose. Girls thought it was funny, but not in a good way.
My father was a distinguished English professor at Wheaton College (in suburban Chicago) and my mother was an academic librarian, but early in life I decided not to become an academic myself. Nevertheless, as the decades rolled by I never stopped writing, even when I wasn’t sure anyone was paying attention at all. I produced dozens of dog-eared notebooks crammed with brilliant but unpublishable fodder for future biographers, while rambling to the antipodes, from Alaska to Africa, Patagonia to Peoria, SoCal to Baja to Istanbul (where I graduated from high school when my father had a Fulbright there). I earned a living in all manner of ways, as a novice reporter, a house-painter, a gardener, a salt on a shrimp boat, a street vendor, a feisty but feckless entrepeneur. What I longed for more than anything – more than wealth, power, status, even women – was experience.
Life itself, it seemed to me, was the prize above all prizes.
By the time I finished college (at Wheaton and Miami) with a degree in journalism, my academic training was leavened with a far-ranging “natural education” which I have since learned is part of the scholastic pedigree of most of the writers I most admire. After a short stint as a freelancer I got hired as editor of a city magazine in Greensboro, North Carolina, then went on to work a couple of years as a reporter on a daily newspaper in nearby Burlington – the most valuable (and most poorly-paid) part of my post-graduate education. I won a couple of statewide press awards for coverage of a famous shoot-out between the Ku Klux Klan and a group of naïve though well-intentioned union organizers called the Communist Workers Party. Though several of the communist demonstrators were killed in cold blood and on videotape, all the Klanners were ultimately found innocent, after a four-month trial fraught with high drama and a peculiarly Southern notion of “justice.”
I moved on to a job as writer and editor at Rodale Press, in Pennsylvania, where I became involved in one of the most remarkable publishing stories of the 1990s. I’d been working as a senior editor at Prevention (at the time the world’s largest-circulation health magazine) when my boss Mark Bricklin and I created a monthly newsletter called Men’s Health, of which I was executive editor. The newsletter’s purpose was to serve what we felt were the underserved health needs of men, though at the time the “received wisdom” in the culture at large was that men have no particular interest in taking care of their own health, much less reading about it. But from the git-go, that little newsletter was such a booming success that after a couple of years of publication, we took some existing material from back issues, generated some new stories, repackaged the whole thing as a glossy magazine and put 200,000 copies out on newsstands around the country. The early returns were fabulous, so we just kept publishing the durn thing, and today Men’s Health is the largest men’s magazine in the world, outselling GQ and Esquire combined, with editions in 24 foreign countries.
So much for “received wisdom”!
I can’t take credit for the later success of the magazine (though I sure wish I could – or, better yet, that I owned it!) since a couple of years after the launch, I got my first book contract and took a leave of absence from Rodale. That first book, published by HarperCollins, was “Katherine, It’s Time,” a novelistic retelling of a multiple personality case that was extraordinary even among MPD cases. Writing that book was a remarkable and fulfilling experience – I felt that I had discovered what I was supposed to be doing on the planet.
And the personal freedom and intellectual challenge of being an independent writer appealed to me so mightily that I took a big chance and moved my little family down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I intended to try to “make it” as an independent author.
Today, having just finished my seventh book, I suppose I’ve achieved a measure of success. I’ve also come to realize how much my life resembles my dad’s tweedy career in academe — in other words, the life I said I did not want. Now I live in a leafy college town — I occasionally even wear tweed — writing books and articles and indulging a lifelong habit of staring vaguely into the middle distance with a kind of dreamy cheerfulness, wondering what’s going to happen next. In addition to “Katherine” and my new book, “Roar of The Heavens,” I’ve also written three best-selling books about sex and relationships; a book about luck; and a book about how to learn investing secrets in your garden.
My work has also appeared in newspapers and magazines including Esquire, The Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, Prevention, American Way, Adventure Journal and others.
I’m proud to be a long-standing member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a national organization composed of the people who write the books and magazine articles you read. I’m a three-time Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a dating service for writers, painters and musicians who wish to meet The Muse. I’m also honored to serve on the board of the Center for Creative Voices in Media, a fierce and effective nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of independent voices in film, television and printed media. It’s a fight worth fighting!
