3rd Year Student Profile: Mike Meginnis

Mike Meginnis

Mike Meginnis was born. Don't ask him where -- he consistently forgets. In Iowa if his mother was born in Illinois, in Illinois if his mother was born in Iowa. His family moved soon thereafter to Indianapolis, where they lived in his grandparents' basement, stacking laundry on filing cabinets and so on in what would later be an office. In Indiana it is legal to home-school one's children without notifying the state, satisfying any curricular requirements, or in fact schooling one's children. It is not legal, however, for a boy not to register for the draft. Mike learned the fundamentals from his mother, but quickly moved on to largely guiding his own studies, which is a good way to become strange and maladjusted. He did register for the draft. When he applied to undergraduate institutions, he worked with his mother to construct a plausible and honest transcript, though he had never received a grade in his entire life. Butler University took him anyway. Statistically speaking, this was a good bet. He eventually majored in English.

New Mexico State University has been kind enough to let him teach freshman composition and creative writing for these past 2.5 years, and he is told that next semester they will return to that well. He is in his final year as an MFA candidate in fiction. The highlight of his time here has been working on Puerto del Sol, first as a prose editor and then as a managing editor. He has learned so much there. His thesis, Fat Man and Little Boy, is a novel about the atom bombs reincarnated as people. When he is not writing, he is probably playing a video game or looking at a cat.

He has work published or forthcoming in Hobart, elimae, The Lifted Brow, A cappella Zoo, The Sycamore Review, Dark Sky Magazine, PANK Magazine, Mud Luscious, and others. He has also written reviews for The Collagist, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Puerto del Sol. He co-edits the forthcoming magazine Uncanny Valley with his wife, Tracy Bowling.