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Warren Bull spent his childhood in Rock Island, Illinois, which is along the Mississippi river. Many years earlier, Abraham Lincoln tried a case in the city and argued for the rights of railroads to build bridges across the river. Warren attended Knox College, where one of the Lincoln – Douglas debates took place, and the University of Illinois. His graduate training was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and what is now Alliant University in Fresno, California.
He was first licensed as a psychologist in 1983. He has worked for agencies and in private practice, as a therapist and administrator. Warren is licensed in three states and has two national credentials. He currently works for Jewish Family Services.
Warren has been writing for as long as he can remember. He claims to come from a functional family and he is a fierce competitor at trivia games.
Strage Mysteries readers selected Reader of Dreams as the best short story of 2009
The anthology, Medium of Murder, which inlcuded Warren Bull's story, Heidegger's Cat, was a finalist for the USA Book News National Best Books 2008 award for Fiction and Literature Anthology.
Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave short story contest, 2004 for Beecher’s Bibles
Missouri Writers' Guild Award first place in best short story of 2006, for A Lady of Quality
Missouri Writers' Guild Award second place in fiction, winter of 2007, for Ricky's House
Great question. Great timing, too. As you know I have multiple myeloma. About two and a half years ago I had an autologous bone marrow transplant. My stem cells were harvested, my bone marrow was wiped out with chemotherapy and then my stems cells were returned to me in a "rescue transplant." On 4/16/10 I'm going to start a second transplant procedure.
Cancer changed my entire life including my writing. It forced me to concentrate on the essentials because I didn't have time to worry about peripheral matters. I recognized how lucky and blessed I am to have a loving and supportive family, wonderful friends, a job that makes a difference in the world, and a passion for writing. To prepare for the transplant I improved my self-care through exercise, relaxation/meditation and listening to music. I kept that up during my slow recovery and I still practice those every day.
Unlike some people, to me cancer has not been a wonderful learning experience or a way to broaden my horizons. It has been an illness I would gladly do without. I don?t look at the upcoming transplant as chapter two in a learning exercise or a divine test. I do believe I can choose to learn from it just as I can choose to learn from other life events.
As the result of the treatment, I was more miserable than I have ever been before. There was a period of time when I lost the concentration and energy required to feel bored. Long stretches of time passed without me being aware of it. For example, each of my sisters came to see me in the hospital. They left. I remember those moments clearly. I still cannot tell you what my sisters and I did in the days between their arrival and their departure. I experienced events and emotions I had never felt before. I had visual hallucinations, which I enjoyed in an odd way. I also had delusions, which were terrible and wrenching emotionally even though I knew even at the time that the chemotherapy was causing them. After the transplant I was as helpless as a newborn. Plants, animals, children, even eating the wrong food could have killed me.
The experience of having cancer has helped in my writing and my life to understand how someone feels when an nightmare is thrust upon them. I came to feel how fragile life is and how terrifying the risk of dying can be. During my recovery, writing was the last skill to return in the course of my recovery. Six months after the transplant I was back at work part-time doing psychotherapy but I could not yet write creatively. Writing is the most complex activity I do. I enjoy writing well enough to bring myself to tears, laugh out loud or to break into a sweat. I believe that I write more slowly now but I hope I write with more depth and understanding of both tragedies and joys.
As a fellow Sniplits author, I wonder if you prefer writing short stories to other forms of writing? Always interested in the opinion of a published writer. Thanks. Tom Anselm
I think every form has its attractions. Novels allow layering, multiple subplots and some leisure in writing. I like writing novels but I have to be willing to spend a lot of time with the characters and to make a major commitment to a single work. Short stories, especially very short stories, require discipline and focus but allow exploring smaller themes and briefer periods of time. I like to explore different "voices," points of view and sub-genres. I like to give expression to lots of the voices inside my head. Also, its a lot easier to find a publisher for a short story than for a novel. I've told some stories worth sharing in creative non-fiction. I like writing memoirs. I hope some people I've known might be remembered a little longer or maybe introduced to people who never had the chance to meet them through my writing. It's quite satisfying. One of the most interesting forms of writing I've done is to help my father write his (unpublished) memoirs. It gave me a chance to see him as a scared teenager yanked out of college and sent to the front lines in World War II. I don't think I would ever have known him in that way if we hadn't worked together. He got a chance to leave a record for his descendants, which he very much wanted to do. Of course when I started writing I did not dream I'd have the chance to work with my dad.
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A young black woman in the '60s demonstrates the meaning of quality in this tale which won the Missouri Writers' Guild Award for the best short story of 2006.
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Sometimes, the wrong man is the right man for the job. Humorous. Some sexual references.
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Books by Warren Bull