Jonathan DeCoteau

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About the Author

Jonathan Adam DeCoteau lives near a cemetery and indicates that has made all the difference in his writing.

“You develop a strange sense of peace and a desire to pay homage to those who’ve come before,” he states. “It does make a difference to wake up in the morning, look out the window, and see a gravesite staring back at you. Sure, it may not be as cheery as sunshine on the windowpane, but it’s a keen reminder that our time here is limited and that we must tell our stories lest the world forgets.”

Most of Jonathan’s work feels haunted by the need to remember and to understand. As an English teacher, Jonathan edited an award-winning student publication The Glory and The Dream, which contained the poetry and fiction of writers during the World War II period to the present.

“It’s amazing the way those kids during perceived the last century’s greatest war. They had a different way of looking at politics and at reality.”

Remembrance also made its way into Jonathan’s first collection of stories, Sing of The High Country, a work haunted by the bloody sins of New England’s past, vividly painted upon the page.

“I just wanted to indicate that slavery, plantations—these did exist, in the North just as in the South, even if not in the same abundance. Slavery, racism, oppression—these are national issues, not regional ones. They’re part of the human story and they need to be told.”

Sing of the High Country went on to win The 2005 Writers Notes Book Award in General Fiction and place as finalist in The 2004 The Foreword Magazine Book of the Year competition. Jonathan’s work has also appeared in Reader’s Quarterly.

The macabre does have its rewards, however. Jonathan wrote The Naked Earth after reading about Nazi atrocities in Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower.

“In class one day, I asked students if Karl, a Nazi officer, would truly feel sorry if he weren’t on death’s doorstep, but had to live an agonizingly long life knowing that he killed the innocent. Would a life of repentance change anything? The bell rang and the students left. But the question remained. That’s when I discovered Evan Khein Al-Mohummad, who took me on a journey to uncover the limits of human atrocity and redemption.”