A moving love story and a powerful psychological study of alienation and grief, Clay Center presents a startling examination of that time in which the American dream was revealed to contain its own nightmare. The bold, direct prose and intense humanity of this brilliant novel of the Vietnam generation give it the feel of a classic.
Phil Condon's books are River Street (stories, SMU Press, Dallas, 1994); Clay Center (novel, EWU Press, Spokane, 2004, recipient of the Novel Award from the Faulkner Society of New Orleans); Montana Surround: Land, Water, Nature, and Place (essays, Johnson Books, Boulder CO, 2004); and most recently, Nine Ten Again, stories, (recipient of the 2008 Elixir Press Fiction Award in Denver).
His stories and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Northern Lights, The Black Warrior Review, High Desert Journal, Epoch, Manoa, and many other journals. He received an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, led a writing residency for the National Writers' Voice, taught fiction and nonfiction writing in the Spaulding University MFA program (Louisville), and received the A.B. Guthrie Short Fiction Award at CutBank. Throughout the 1990's he taught composition, fiction, and nonfiction writing at the University of Montana.
Born in Cheyenne and raised in Omaha, Phil Condon attended Pomona College for one year in the 1960's. Subsequently, he lived in California, British Columbia, Missouri, and since 1987, in Missoula, Montana. Before returning to college as a 37-year-old sophomore, he worked as a union bricklayer for ten years and lived without electricity for five years on the Niangua River in the Missouri Ozarks. His academic education includes a BA in Writing, an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction, and an MS in Environmental Studies/Writing. He currently teaches Environmental Writing and Literature to undergraduate and graduate students as an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana.
