If You Knew Then What I Know Now, Ryan VanMeter
The middle-American coming-of-age finds new life in Van Meter's coming-out, made as strange as it is familiar by acknowledging the role played by sexuality. If You Knew Then What I Know Now reinvents the memoir with all-encompassing empathy. This is essay as an argument for the intimate, and an embrace of all the skinned knees in our stumble toward adulthood.
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Additional Info
Ryan Van Meter grew up in Missouri and studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Chicago for ten years and worked in advertising. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from The University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at The University of San Francisco.