about the author

about the author: John Amatangelo

John Amatangelo is this year's first place fiction winner for his story, "Notice." John is a 30-year-old native of Ohio, though he has lived in numerous places including Iowa, Arkansas, Texas, and Florida. After a few semesters of college a while back, John and his wife are currently back in school together, and John is ultimately headed for MFA degrees in creative writing and painting.

John has been writing avidly since he was a teenager in Iowa. As a sophomore in high school, the 14-year-old John started writing comic books, initially to give himself "something to draw." New Light Press, the comic book company he started at the time, turned out to be a great place for an emergent writer; several of the artists are still working in the industry for Marvel and D.C. Comics. Soon John's passion for writing superseded his interest in drawing, and he won a Drake Young Writers Award for his comics in both 1995 and 1996. John reflects that "thinking in those terms [comics] helped my writing in the long run."

Around the same time, John started to work with film, making comedic action movies with his friends. In 1999, his experimental film entitled Welcome the Life won a regional award for best screenplay for a drama from IRIS, the International Radio and Television Society. Aside from writing the screenplay, John wrote the music and cut the entire piece himself with a video camera and two VCRs. His current project, Dead in the Valley, is described as a "historical western crime film" and developed out of a five-page pitch originally created for a film class. The script is set in the Rio Grande Valley, where John lived for some time as a kid. The story intersects with events in early Texas history including the last president of the Republic of Texas, the beginning of the state in 1846, and the founding of Baylor University.

When asked for a piece of advice for aspiring writers, John emphasized the need to "care about the characters" as well as the importance of dialogue. Drawing from Elmore Leonard's book 10 Rules of Writing, John reiterates "it's gotta be real" and "you don't need anything but said." As an author/narrator, John strives to "move the story along so they don't notice you're there" and cites the playwright David Mamet as another powerful influence. A second John Amatangelo story, "Symposium," is also available in this issue

of Flamingo Writer.