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The Books of Rick Comandich
Rick Comandich
Photo by John Fenger
PicturePhoto by Steve Calabrese
I was born in Manhattan in the second year of the baby boom.  The hospital, now defunct, was in Chelsea, four blocks from Hell's Kitchen.  (That would've made a better story.)  

After graduating from Boston College, I taught American History in Xavier, a Jesuit high school in Concord MA, for a year, to get out of the draft.  I had no training in education, but Concord offered great opportunities in history.  Field trips!  And Walden raises deep issues about our culture.  To teach about World War II, I assigned Catch-22.  I took two students on a field trip to Washington D.C., to join a protest against the Vietnam War.  I still can't believe their parents let them come.     

After that, as an itinerant hippie, I worked in operating rooms in Boston and Marin County, and in a drug addiction hospital on the Lower East Side.  I also bummed around America, Europe and western Asia.  


PictureWith daughter Kirsten near Cape Town, a return trip
I lived for five years in Cape Town, South Africa, the homeland of the mother of our children, after meeting her in Disneyland.  I worked for a life insurance company in Cape Town.  

Throughout my thirty-year business career, I wrote an hour each day before going to work.  My first two novels, To The Other Side and Gamblers, were initially written in that time slot, after the coffee kicked in. 

Reading great literature has been the most fulfilling activity in my life, aside from paternity.  I write because I want to give something back to that source of great pleasure.     


PictureKen Kesey, Ashland Writer's Conf.
I moved to Portland decades before it became hip, worked in banking, and ended up a Senior Vice President in the largest bank in the Pacific Northwest until the bank was acquired.  I retired from my last job, in banking software, before I stopped playing basketball, the latter a far more difficult decision.  

I've attended the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writing conferences, and studied as well with Molly Gloss and Ken Kesey.  

I have three grown children and live with the writer Maya Muir.  I've had no television for decades and have no cell phone.  I ride my bike all around Portland with thousands of other grayhairs.  I've served on the board of Literary Arts, the nationally-renowned literary center.  Portland has a great literary culture, easy access to many beautiful places, and a temperate climate.  A fine place to live. 



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