OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY
“When I write a story, it’s like it was already out there, only waiting for me to uncover it. I aim to go where we’ve all been before, yet see it with fresh eyes and report back. ”
Larry F. Sommers is a Wisconsin writer of historical fiction, seeking fresh meanings in our common past.
He is the author of Price of Passage–A Tale of Immigration and Liberation, a historical novel published in August 2022. He won Honorable Mention in The Saturday Evening Post’s 2018 Great American Story Contest for “The Lion’s Den,” a tale of childhood in the 1950s, and has published other, similar stories in the online version of The Saturday Evening Post.
He served as editor of The Congregationalist, a national church-related quarterly magazine, from 2009 to 2016 and previously worked 23 years in the Public Affairs Office of the Wisconsin National Guard/Wisconsin Emergency Management as a writer, editor, photographer, writing coach, and public affairs consultant in a fast-paced environment punctuated by crisis communication events.
A Vietnam-era veteran of the U.S. Air Force, he is active in church work and is a member of the Sons of Norway and two local writers’ critique groups.
He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife and two dogs.
–October 2022
UNOFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY
I wrote my first story on my Big Chief pencil tablet, in third grade, when I was supposed to be doing something else. Though a shameless imitation of Richard Diamond, Private Detective—a Saturday radio serial of those days—it was a pretty good story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
After that, I got sidetracked for a few decades in the circuitous business of living a life.
In 2009 I retired from my full-time job and immediately began a wonderful part-time job at the helm of a prestigious religious periodical. At the end of 2015, I retired from this great gig so I could give my whole attention to learning the art of fiction.
I write fiction because I think that it’s the best way to tell the truth. I write historical fiction because I seek to find fresh meanings in our common past.
–October 2022