My honest writer bio

After reading Ellen Potter’s amusing post entitled, “The Big Fat Lie of the Author Bio,” my enterprising friend Nova wrote “a more honest author bio,” and challenged other writers to do the same.

Aha! A challenge! I shall take thee up on your (thy? dammit. I suck at Old English? Middle English?) quest! Um.

My official bio, up at on my About page, reads:

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as ZYZZYVA, Verbsap, and Yomimono. An adjunct instructor at a local college, I received an Ardella Mills Fiction Prize from Mills College in 2005, placed as a finalist in Poets and Writers Magazine’s Writers Exchange Contest in 2007, and received an honorable mention in Glimmertrain’s Fiction Open in 2009.

I earned my undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and my MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. I am the Fiction Editor at Kartika Review and, in addition to writing short stories, I have a novel in progress.

It’s so sanitized. So professional sounding.

My more honest bio (written spontaneously, because honesty comes without premeditation) would read:

Christine works at a dining room table surrounded by piles of teaching materials and student papers that need constant grading and she writes with a needy geriatric wiener dog who smells like corn chip Fritos on her lap and another needy wiener dog with feral survival tendencies who is up to no good somewhere in the kitchen. She dotes on her husband who dotes on her and together they get through her sporadic writing self esteem troughs that sometimes attack daily and sometimes leave her alone for weeks. She should be running and exercising, but instead she is baking cookies and eating them. By herself. In front of her laptop. Trying to revise her novel. She is very pale.

What is your honest author/writer bio?