A Conversation with Dean Bakopoulos

Piece Description

Born and raised in greater Detroit, Dean Bakopoulos easily navigates the worlds of fiction and journalism. Currently a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University, Dean has lectured at Michigan, Cornell, and other universities about the economic and environmental problems facing the post-industrial Rust Belt.  He has published related essays and criticism in many publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The Believer. 

He is equally successful in translating these concerns into fiction. His first novel, Please Don't Come Back From The Moon received critical acclaim and was named a New York Times notable book. In Please Don't Come Back From The Moon, Dean Bakopoulos delivers a piece of fiction that looks at the day-to-day struggles of the working class with an eye that combines a  grittily realism with moments of  sheer  magic. Dean paints a vivid picture of a working class Michigan neighborhood where one-by-one the men disappear. When sixteen-year-old Michael's father joins the exodus and Mike and his friends stumble through their adolescence and adulthood unable to leave the neighborhood their fathers long abandoned. I spoke with Dean Bakopoulos recently and about Please Don't Come Back From The Moon. I began our conversation by asking him to tell me about his protagonist Michael.