I started writing my first memoir, City of Crows, when my wife was pregnant with our second child.  Our first son was just learning to walk when my UFO-obsessed father, who I’d long been estranged from, passed away in the sky over Roswell, New Mexico. My wife was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer at the time.  This was a dark period in my life, yet also one of wonder, as I watched our young son develop.  Joe Blair’s By the Iowa Sea was a memoir that resonated with me and partially inspired me to write my own book.  Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, and the Nick Adams stories of Ernest Hemingway are probably the biggest influences on my writing.  I’ve spent the last eighteen years carrying mail in Minneapolis.  My creative nonfiction has appeared in Atticus Review, Nowhere Magazine, Memoir Magazine, High Plains Register, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and River Teeth Journal’s Beautiful Things. City of Crows was named a 2017 Many Voices Project finalist by New Rivers Press. More recently, The Skinny Kid, a memoir about my childhood, was named a 2023 Aurora Polaris Prize finalist by Trio House Press.

[Readers are welcome to write me at jflorey33@hotmail.com. Just be sure to state your business on the subject line.]