Who the hell is
CHRIS BELDEN
and why is he
writing those
terrible things
about me?
Read my flash fiction story "Termite Walks into a Bar . . ."
Chris Belden was born & raised in Canton, Ohio (pop. 100K in 1960, now 70K), also home to Thurman Munson, the O’Jays & Marilyn Manson. He survived 12 years of Catholic school (including a decade of unmolested service as an altar boy), earning decent if not outstanding grades. He wrote his first story in seventh grade, a vampire tale blatantly ripped off from the classic TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). Soon he moved on to Super 8 film directing, including an adaptation of Macbeth starring best friends Matt Sedmock (in the title role) and John Augustine (MacDuff) as well as Chris’s brother Patrick as Lady Macbeth. Chris attended the University of Michigan, where he watched movies for four years as a Film & Video major (well, he didn’t just watch movies; he also drank beer & played drums in various rock’n’roll combos).
After graduating, he parleyed his Bachelor of Arts degree into a backroom job at JC Penney while pursuing stardom as drummer in the locally semi-famous Ann Arbor band The Slang. This somehow lasted four years, during which the band performed countless gigs & released the much-praised single “Pick It Up/Out of the Light.” The Slang played backup on Joe Henry’s first LP Talk of Heaven (1986), after which Chris & Slang guitarist AJ Kydd made the big move to NYC to play with Joe at such venues as CBGB, Tramps & Maxwell’s. Chris set down his drumsticks not long after & got a steady office job as a publicist at Warner Books (now defunct), where he shilled for books by James Ellroy, Arthur Ashe & legendary U of M coach Bo Schembechler, among others.
This is me on drums playing on Joe Henry's song "Farm Club," circa 1985.
Here is my band The Slang performing "Nuclear Baby" in 1984.
These two photos by the great Marion Ettlinger.
Listen to my song about Marion Ettlinger!
Around this time, he started workshopping his fiction at the Writers Studio, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz. Now in his 30s, & suddenly aware of his own mortality, Chris volunteered his time to the Prospect Park Alliance (where he planted a million tulips) as well as Literacy Partners NYC and the NY Writers Coalition. He was also an inaugural member of the Bronx WritersCorp, facilitating workshops at several South Bronx senior centers. In 1996, Chris & his good friend David Henry’s screenplay Amnesia was made into a mediocre B film starring Ally Sheedy, John Savage & Sally Kirkland. Around this time, not content with the waves of money rolling in from his various creative endeavors, Chris became involved with the theater world, writing, directing & performing in short plays at Ensemble Studio Theatre, where he studied with the late great Curt Dempster (Chris remains an artist member of EST). This led to joining the Lexington Group and cowriting & costarring in their play “The Ballad of Larry the Flyer,” which ran at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston SC and the NY Int’l Fringe Festival (2001).
In the late 90s, Chris started writing & performing songs that eventually made their way onto two albums, Songs About Anything (2003) & Camouflage (2008). In 2003, the beautiful & talented Melissa DeMeo made an honest man of Chris. A few years later their daughter Frankie was born and, after 20 years in NYC, Chris moved with his family to the wilds of Connecticut. In 2009, the Jesuits finally got hold of Chris when he attended Fairfield University’s MFA program, graduating in 2011. Later that year, his novel Carry-on was published by Rain Mountain Press, followed in 2013 by Shriver (Rain Mountain) and his Fairfield Book Prize-winning story collection The Floating Lady of Lake Tawaba (2014, New Rivers Press). In 2015, Touchstone Books re-issued Shriver, which was eventually adapted for the big screen under the disappointing title A Little White Lie (2023), starring Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson & Da’Vine Joy Randolph, among many others.
Read my story "The Woodpecker Problem" in Sixfold magazine.
Hear a tune from the play
"The Ballad of Larry the Flyer"!
Photo by the late, great Sarah Coleman.
LISTEN TO CB'S 2004 INTERVIEW ON NPR.
From 2009 to 2020, Chris facilitated a weekly creative writing workshop at Garner Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Newtown CT. This resulted in the anthology Closer to Freedom (2023, Woodhall Press), a collection of poetry & prose written by his incarcerated students. In 2019, Chris was named a CT Arts Hero by the CT Office of the Arts for his work in prison. He has also run fiction workshops since 2014 at the Westport Writers Workshop and currently oversees a weekly writing group at Home Bridge Ventures, a re-entry program for returning citizens. Fed up with the publishing circus, Chris recently self-published the novels The Private Dick and The Vote as well as the story collection Who Am I to Judge?, all available at Amazon (unfortunately). He lives with his family on a small lake, where he continues to compose (& occasionally perform) songs and still dreams of writing a novel that will sell more than 800 copies.
READ my essay about Ishiguro's THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.
Hear my interview about Closer to Freedom on PUBLIC READING CLUB.
Photos by Pete Duval
Read my story "The Black Bear."