Spotlight on Tom Bailey, BA’84

Novelist, Professor of English at Susquehanna University

Failing the first grade, being diagnosed with a reading disorder and getting a 1.9 grade point average the first semester of freshman year at Marshall is not usually a measure of great success. However, for Barboursville native Tom Bailey the struggle with dyslexia and the process of learning to read led to a career Tom never could have imagined early in life.

Tom entered Marshall University with the goal of becoming a physical therapist, but he did not do well in classes. What he really liked to do and had been doing since the fifth grade was to write. But it never occurred to him he could ever be good enough to write for a living.

Then Tom signed up for Marshall English professor Jane Wells’ creative writing class and everything changed.

“I owe Jane my life,” Tom said. “She was the first person to tell me I had a gift as a writer. At that point I just needed someone to tell me I was good at something. I credit her with teaching me the importance of weighing every word and to listen to the characters when I write their stories.”

Tom became obsessed with writing. He never waited for a deadline. He got up early every day to write. English professors Richard Spilman and Lenny Deutsch also encouraged Tom. “Had they not all taken me seriously, I never would have accomplished what I have.”

Soon, Tom turned his 1.9 into a 4.0. Upon graduation, he was selected for the Teaching Writing Fellowship at the University of Iowa’s famed Writer’s Workshop where he went on to earn a master of fine arts degree. He received his doctorate in 1991 from the State University of New York-Binghamton. He taught at SUNY-Cortland for three years and Harvard University for five years, and now teaches creative writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.

Among other honors, Tom received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and a Newhouse Award from the John Gardner Foundation. He has published Crow Man, a collection of short fiction, as well as On Writing Short Stories and A Short Story Writer's Companion, both from Oxford University Press.

Tom’s greatest work to date is his first novel, The Grace That Keeps This World, published by Random House. The work is about the events that befall a tightly knit rural town following a tragic hunting accident. The novel which tackles the bond of family and community and the solace of belief is based on his earlier short story, Snow Dreams. It won the Pushcart Award, a yearly prize given for the best literary works published by small presses.

The lyrical quality of Tom’s writing style is partly due to his dyslexia. “I was taught to read by sounds,” Tom explained. “My understanding of language offers me a different way of seeing things. Sometimes this can be problematic in my writing – my syntax can be a little off, for example. But I think writing is about more than how well you write sentence to sentence. I think it is about ‘seeing.’ In the end, the dyslexia may have been a blessing for me. It helps me ‘see’ things differently.

“What I want more than anything is to have readers,” Tom added. “That is why I became a writer. Fiction has a job to do. It deepens feelings. Fiction is what is true at heart. It’s a way of examining yourself about dealing with grief, belief in God and community, and it makes sense of senselessness and chaos.”

Bailey’s second novel, Cotton Song, will be published by Random House in Fall 2006. He is at work on his third novel, Sunny Hills.

Tom’s wife, Sarah, is a managing editor for Susquehanna University Press. They have three children, Samuel, Isabel and William, and an English mastiff named Addie.