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     Mark Spencer's budding career as a writer began during the summer of 1963. He was 7 years old and just through the first grade at Withamsville Elementary School in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, when he wrote his first "novel."

   Spencer has forgotten the name, but does remember it revolved around a 1920s gangster and was just over 100 pages long.

   "I wrote really big so the book would be longer," Spencer remembers with a laugh. "And the gangster dies on page three."

   A quick look around Mark Spencer's office at the University of Arkansas at Monticello provides a revealing look at its occupant. On the wall is a framed cover of Life Magazine with a black and white photo of Ernest Hemingway. The bookshelves feature the works of Spencer’s favorite authors, Hemingway and William Faulkner, as well as short story collections from Russian author Anton Chekhov.

   On closer inspection, some of the books on Spencer's shelves carry a familiar name – his own.

   Spencer is dean of the School of Arts and Humanities and a prolific writer who currently has four short stories and a novella in the final stages of publication. His short stories include "Ashes," due out in The Chariton Review next fall; "Honey, I Am Only a Big Foot," scheduled for publication in The First Bewildering Stories Anthology by Adventure Books; "The King," also included in The Bewildering Stories Anthology; and "Trespasser," slated for publication in the February issue of Amarillo Bay.

   His novella, "Henry," appears in the January issue of Admit Two.

   Spencer, who says he writes mostly mainstream fiction, published his first short stories in 1985 while working as an instructor of English at Southwest Missouri State. His writing career blossomed at Cameron University in Edmond, Okla., where he served first as an assistant professor, then director of creative writing and associate professor, assistant chair and finally chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages.

   Spencer came to UAM last June and brought with him a resume as a scholar and a published author.

   "I think it's important that I be a published writer," he says. "Writing makes me a better creative writing instructor and a better instructor of literature. As a literature instructor, I look at things not only from the perspective of a scholar, but as a writer. It gives me an authority in the classroom I wouldn't have otherwise. Students want to study creative writing under a published author. I wouldn't have the same authority if I'd never published anything."

   Spencer encourages his creative writing students to publish, which sets him apart from many of his colleagues at other universities.

   "I've been around faculty at other schools who don't think their students will ever get anything published so they tell them not to try," Spencer says. "I've had students publish novels and books of short stories. I tell them it can happen."

   Spencer's more recent writing has been confined mostly to short stories and novellas, but he has published two novels – "The Weary Motel," which won the 1999 Omaha Prize for the Novel; and "Love and Reruns in Adams County." Other works include "Wedlock," which includes two novellas and three short stories, and "Spying on Lovers," a collection of 15 short stories.

   He doesn't have the time to write novels any more and never writes about his own experiences, choosing to focus on people very different from himself. His inspirations come from a variety of sources.

   "Sometimes it might be a very small thing that will trigger an idea," says Spencer. "It might be something as simple as seeing a car and a person driving by. It makes me wonder about that person and their life. There is a real poignancy behind the lives of ordinary people. I'm curious about the lives of other people. I don't think you can be a good writer without being curious."

   Spencer has written nearly 70 short stories and novels and his subject matter ranges from the ghost of Elvis Presley to Big Foot to an 80-year-old widow trying to learn how to drive her dead husband's pick-up truck.

   "I've always had a desire to write," Spencer says. "I never really needed a lot of encouragement. I've always viewed myself as a little dull, so I write about people who aren't like me. In one sense, we're all curious about other people. That's why we gossip. I just take it a step farther and write about it."

   (The following is an excerpt from “Ashes,” a short story by Mark Spencer to be published in the international literary magazine The Chariton Review, based at Brigham Young University. The story concerns an 80-year-old widow trying to learn to drive.)
 

   From "Ashes:"

    "Back in the truck cab, she stares at the fence posts supporting strings of barbed wire and capped by clumps of snow. Her boundaries have always been clear, and she has lived with a sense of peace if not much else. She has put up preserves, fed chickens, cooked, mopped floors, mended clothes, reared a son. It has been a life without . . . without monsters, she tells herself. Until now. This truck, so dark green it's almost black, is a monster. Foam belches out of the vinyl upholstery. Smoke spews from its rear. She can grab a fat hen by its neck, press it against a tree stump, slam the heavy hatchet down and not think twice about the fountain of blood. She has always been a tough woman, she assures herself. Practical. A farmer's wife. But this truck . . ."

    For a complete list of Mark Spencer’s published works, contact Jim Brewer, director of media services, at (870) 460-1074.

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