Joe Meno started writing when he was 14, after a girl he knew from his Evergreen Park neighborhood shot herself in the head. “It was the first time someone of my own age had died and, well, it affected me, I guess,” says Meno, who’s now 27. “I started writing songs about it for this punk band I was in, and it was the first time I’d written about myself or my life, and that led me to writing poetry and then eventually short stories.”
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Meno struggled with storytelling through his teens and into his first college experience, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He took some workshops there but found them unsatisfying and stifling–“I’d get this asinine feedback like, ‘You should change that guy’s name.’” He remembers the head of the UIUC writing program saying of one of his decidedly “non-New Yorker” stories, which are a hybrid of gritty midwestern drama and magic realism, “You’re never going to be successful writing this kind of thing.” Meno dropped out in 1994, after two years, and moved back to Chicago, where he worked at the Alley on Belmont selling rock T-shirts and drug paraphernalia.
With the help of a faculty member, he soon sold his first piece of fiction to a Barnes & Noble anthology called 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories. It was the same story the program head in Champaign had predicted would get him nowhere. Meno shakes his head. “I still get royalty checks for it.”
