Who am I?
Who am I?
When I was younger I knew I wanted to build a creative life, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. I also finished college shortly before the 2008 recession, so I had trouble finding jobs that suited me, especially in rural New Hampshire.
As I talk about on my older blog, But I Also Have a Day Job, I’ve worked a variety of jobs both out of necessity, and because I had trouble finding a good fit. My first full-time job was in environmental protection, but I’ve also worked as a housepainter, a dairy clerk, a greenhouse assistant, a tutor, a gardener, a hand-lotion salesman, an electronics writer, and an online test-grader.
Mostly, though, I lived and taught in English in Japan, once from 2009-2011 at a private conversation school, and again from 2018-2022 on the JET Program and at Kanagawa University in Yokohama. （日本語が少し分かるけど、あまり苦手です。。。）
All that time, I was also trying to become a writer and figure out what that meant to me. I worked on a novel about Japanese life for a long time that eventually became Eikaiwa Bums, and completed a two-year creative writing master’s at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Grad school opened a lot of doors for me, but was overall a rough, emotionally draining experience, and I wish the atmosphere there had been more positive. (That’s basically what led to my first published novel, MFA Thesis Novel.)
In grad school I also picked up my first paid jobs as an academic editor and worked for the University of Nebraska Press, both of which led to more editing jobs down the line. I do mostly freelance editing for a living now, which you can read more about here, and teach in the online MFA Program at Western Connecticut State University.
Now I’m back in the US, where I finished my second novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, a comic fantasy novel about role-playing. As a small-press indie writer, I’m looking to get more of my work out there and meet other cool people in all kinds of creative fields, since it’s a big, exciting world out there.
If you want to support my work, check out my books, sign up for my email list, or follow me on social media.
Stay classy, everybody.
Publicity Bio
Ian M. Rogers is an author, editor, and instructor in the online MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. He grew up in New Hampshire before studying literature at Bennington College in Vermont and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he learned to write short bios like this one. He has also worked as a copy editor, a greenhouse assistant, a school secretary, a grocery clerk, an online test-grader, a housepainter, a gardener, and a teacher of English in Japan. He likes being a writer the most, though.