User:Steffanpiper

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Steffan Piper (born May 12, 1971) novelist and poet, was born in abject poverty in Altoona, Pennsylvania to a single-parent family. Youngest of two, he has a sister Danette, who still resides in the town made famous by the Pittsburgh Pirates Baseball team and the Railroad. He noted the changing of his name an accommodation for those looking at it to pronounce it phonetically.

Steffan spent much of his youth traveling from several places in California with his mother and sister and then back to Altoona to live with his grandmother on and frequent basis. This was later used as the basis for the book Greyhound, which chronicled the fictional / semi-fictional events of the author as he traversed the country on multiple occasions via Greyhound Bus both with his sister and sometimes alone. As a minor, he lived in Stockton, Lodi, and Sacramento, California; Mt. Vernon, Missouri, Felixstowe, England and Anchorage Alaska. He began writing during this period and was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Iceberg Slim, Henry Miller and Carlos Castaneda.

At nineteen, realizing that his childhood desire to join the Jesuits was not going to be realized, he joined the United States Marines, out of San Diego and was stationed at the 8th & I Marine Barracks in Washington D.C. as a White House Guard until he volunteered for duty in Iraq during the Gulf War campaign of 1991. After military service he returned to Alaska where he worked a multitude of jobs around the state, a Crab Fisher off St. Paul Island, bartending in Nome, Alaska and later an assistant legal librarian in Anchorage, for both a private law-firm and the University of Alaska, Anchorage. It was during this period that he wrote his first work of fiction Exit, a bleak patricidal tale involving a Japanese-American diabetic. In early 1996, he moved to Los Angeles, where he was homeless for a period of time, and then later found work in Pharmacy at the Veterans Administration and University of California, Los Angeles. By this time, most of the work for his first publication of poetry Electronic Butterflies was penned.

In 1998, he married and later divorced by 2001. A period marked by strip clubs, women and legal trouble, it was the synthesis for the book Yellow Fever, his second fictional release that covered the underworld of a Chinese Stripper from Los Angeles, and it’s follow-up companion White Trash, a story of naïve mid-western girls coming to Los Angeles to be actresses, but ending up as glass-addicts in Sunland; a poverty-ridden suburb above Los Angeles.

A second release of poetry, also as spoken word, was completed by 2006, titled Observations of a Dead Man and All my Suicides, a chilling semi-fictional story encompassing the author’s continued battle with suicidal ideation and later hospitalization. Work was also completed for the finished novel Waiting for Andre the semi-fictional account of the friendship between wrestler Andre The Giant and Samuel Beckett, playwright and novelist.

In 2006, Steffan hiked the Appalachian Trail, known commonly as the AT. He started from Springer, Mtn. on January 1 and hiked into Harper's Ferry on April 28. After contracting pneumonia and having to be hospitalized and loosing 28lbs. Steffan returned to Los Angeles completing half the distance or 1,021 miles.

Books

Exit (1998)

Electronic Butterflies (2000)

Yellow Fever (2003)

White Trash (2005)

All my Suicides (2006)

Waiting for Andre (2006)

Observations of a Dead Man (2006)

Greyhound (2007)