A Balcony in Brooklyn
and other stories
by
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About the Author
I have been writing since about age 12. My first efforts appeared in school newspapers, and in the Yale Literary Magazine. At various times, I have written non-ficiton, fiction, poetry, stage plays and scripts. I have published a lot of poetry, here and there, and won several awards and prizes. Two of the stories in this collection have reached print, one in the Yale Literary Magazine, one in The Writers International Forum. Another won a prize in the 1999 Fiction Competition of Montgomery NLAPW and Montgomery Press & Authors Club.
I was an editor of The Yale Literary Magazine during my Junior and Senior years. After graduation, I followed advice which Thornton Wilder once gave me. He recommended teaching as a way to pay the bills while learning my trade as a writer. I taught French and Spanish at several school, one public, the others private.
Tom McMahon, who was Editor-In-Chief of the Lit, kept asking me when I was going to stop fooling around and write something. Tom took a post greduate year at Yale with Robert Penn Warren as his mentor. Once, when I visited him at Yale, he harrassed me into writing a short story which he pronounced well-seen and worth polishing. I went on teaching for thirteen years, writing something occasionally.
My fluency in Mandarin Chinese landed for a time me in an off-the-wall military intelligence venture in Korea, from which I have written two of the stories in this collection.
In the Sixties, when Timothy Leary and his cohorts convinced kids to tune in, turn on and drop out, I left teaching for a different, more lucrative avoidance strategy; I became a programmer/analyst. This lasted twenty years. When downsizing struck, I gave up avoiding the issue. I have been writing ever since.
James Hall
Pueblo, Colorado
June 18, 2000