I was born in Fargo, North Dakota, but the Veterans Administration transferred my dad to Kansas when I was two, and I grew up in Topeka, going to Catholic schools. I attended Washburn University on a scholarship for two years (and took my first creative writing class from Tom Averill, a writer I admire to this day), but lost my scholarship and dropped out and worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. When the railroad laid me off, I used my railroad unemployment benefits to go back to college, this time at the University of Kansas, and got a degree in journalism.I worked as an editor at small-town newspapers in Kansas for a few years, then went to Europe and worked without a visa at a youth hostel in Edinburgh, Scotland. One day at the hostel, I found a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls on the communal bookshelf. By the time I got to the last sentence--"He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest"--my childhood desire to become a writer had reawakened.It took a few more years, but I ended up in the University of Arkansas MFA program, where I met a green-eyed poet, Katrina Vandenberg. Katrina and I moved to Saint Paul in 2001. I'd never lived here, but my great-great grandfather, Theodore Wiemann, became a U.S. citizen in Saint Paul in 1856, shortly after the city was founded, and owned a saloon and grocery downtown. My great-grandfather, Michael Reimringer, clerked for Theodore and boarded with the family; family legend has it that Theodore was unhappy when Michael married his daughter, Anna, in 1880. Michael confirmed his father-in-law's doubts when, after fathering four children with Anna, he got drunk at the second-ever Saint Paul Winter Carnival, fell off the back of a sleigh, and cracked his skull.When Katrina and I moved to Saint Paul shortly after my father's death in 2001, Vestments, the novel I'd been working on about a Catholic priest, took off. My dad had grown up here, and the combination of missing him and moving to his very-Catholic hometown inspired a book that's a love letter to the city and my father, and an elegy for the progressive post-Vatican II Church of my youth.The manuscript of Vestments didn't sell in New York and was dropped by my agent. But Milkweed Editions, the Minneapolis indie press, picked it up after the publisher heard me give a reading of an excerpt, and the book ended up being a Publishers Weekly best book of 2010 and winning the 2011 Minnesota Book Award for fiction. At the awards dinner, Katrina was pregnant with our daughter. Anna was born a few months later at Saint Joseph's Hospital, across the street from where Theodore Wiemann kept his saloon. She's the sixth generation of Reimringers to live in Saint Paul, and the fifth generation to be born here. Katrina and I feel lucky to live in a bungalow in the old Saint Columba parish neighborhood, raising our little girl and writing books.