Thomas Larson
Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. He holds workshops on memoir writing and delivers multimedia presentations on music, the craft of writing, and the "social author" in the digital age throughout the United States. Larson writes personal essays, memoir, book reviews, and literary and music criticism for many publications, among them Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, New Letters, Fourth Genre, and Free Inquiry. He regularly contributes book reviews to Contrary Magazine and The Rumpus. In the early 1980s, he was the music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican. After getting an undergraduate degree in music composition, he moved to San Diego in 1982 and earned a master's in American literature from UCSD. During the 1990s, he was a professor of English at San Diego City College. Since 1999, he has been a staff writer for the Reader, where he specializes in reportage and narrative cover stories. He teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. Larson lives in Clairemont with his partner Suzanna. His website is thomaslarson.com.
Latest Stories
Debt. Arson. Murder.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011
John Nesheiwat was parked in his car, a rosary on the seat beside him, about a mile from the North Woodson Drive rental home owned by James Kurtenbach, a 4000-square-foot ...
Is He a Citizen?
Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011
On Sixth Avenue, across the street from the block-long Family Court building, stands a row of converted single-family Victorian homes, their yards parking lots, their windows barred. Today those residencies ...
Outside on the Night Shift
Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011
"Basically,” says Aaron Meleen, a deputy sheriff traffic investigator working the night shift in Poway, “we don’t have much going on right now.” It’s a Monday evening, the onset of ...
Hog Wild
Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010
The only sign of life in Julian at 5:00 a.m. this April morning are men in white paper toques rolling out pie dough at the bright-lighted Julian Bakery. It’s a ...
Till death do us part. It's the only way we will.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
When Ginger Bass filed for divorce from her husband Frank in November 2007, she hoped he would not contest the dissolution. She offered to buy out his interest in their ...
After the Music Died
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
No Art Left BehindDespite a maddening mix of fact and fiction about music and our children’s interest in it, local music education is thrumming along. In the past six years, ...
Nonprofits Nonplussed
Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009
At the Bayside Community Center in Linda Vista, things are humming along as they have since the center was founded in 1932 as a settlement house for families of Italian ...
Ex Pros
Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009
If ever there were a San Diego Charger whose postcareer success has matched his years spent on the field, it’s the great Ron Mix. Mix’s glory years came in the ...
Puppeteers: Eight powerful San Diegans who don't want to tell you what they do
Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2009
The tenth floor of San Diego city hall is like a submarine in the sky. Behind sealed windows and an electronic-buttoned security door are the cramped offices of eight councilmembers, ...
If We Didn't Advertise We'd Go Broke Treating the Poor
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Many of us watched the Chargers’ season-ending run this past winter and, amid the cheers and groans, saw a 30-second TV ad starring LaDainian Tomlinson. Well-dressed and calm, he’s holding ...
