The Day After The Day After My Atomic Angst

Steven Church grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxiety and a place that, ever since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in America's popular imagination. His fantasies of nuclear meltdown, genetic mutation and post-apocalyptic survival found a focal point in 1982, when Lawrence, Kansas, became part of a movie set for a film called The Day After. A richly layered and darkly comic memoir.

Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, and most recently, Ultrasonic, which was featured in the LA Times, The Paris Review, and Tin House, among others. His essays have been published and anthologized widely, including in the Best American Essays (2011) and most recently in After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover The Essays. He's a founding editor and nonfiction editor for the nationally recognized literary magazine The Normal School, and he teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State, where he is the Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing.