Zoe Murdock Fiction writer, teacher, author of Torn by God: A Family's Struggle with Polygamy

About Me

	Zoe Murdock Ojai, California Member since: Apr, 2009 Last login: 08/12/2009 Last update : 05/14/2009 Contact Me
photo credit: doc

I've been writing most my life, sometimes with the left side of my brain, as when I wrote technical documentation in the 1980's, and more recently and consistently with the right side of my brain, as when writing my new novel, Torn by God: A Family's Struggle with Polygamy. Either way, my focus has always been on the human mind. My most basic desire is to know how people come to believe what they believe, and how those beliefs lead them to act in specific ways. Exploring the depths of another's mind, with all its intellectual and visceral layers of complexity, is as exciting and stimulating to me as exploring a foreign country.

Given my fascination with mind, I search for books which have a unique and idiosyncratic voice. It is not the writer's voice I am looking for, but the voice of the characters who live out their lives on the pages. For me, is more than just a tone or narrative style: it reflects the movement and subtle nuance of a character's mind, it maps the associative leaps between one experience and the next, and it connects the character's sensory experience with a unique perception. Maybe the best way to say it is that everything in such stories is characterization, to one degree or another. Books such as Jane Hamilton's, Book of Ruth, Frank McCourt's, Angela's Ashes, and Joyce Carol Oates', Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, all have this quality that I so admire.

I come from a large family of six brothers and four sisters, of which I am the middle child. I have no children, as I am still recovering, but don't worry, my brothers and sisters are taking care of procreation. I was raised in a small Mormon town of less than 1000, just down the road from Warren Jeffs. My novel takes place in that town. I wrote the story in an attempt to understand what happened between my parents when I was a child and my father got interested in polygamy.

My passions are writing, reading, teaching writing (an advanced weekly writing workshop - 8 years on-going), and running (everyday on the wonderful mountain trails of Ojai). I also enjoy foreign and intelligent, independent films. I value the music of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Emmy Lou Harris, Joan Baez, and all the achy breaky heartache songs - which I like to sing for anyone who wants to listen. Travel is a wonderful education, especially to Asia. I'd love to experience Greece and India and China.

Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, Book of Ruth, Memoirs of a Survivor, If the Old Could and the Young Would, Drop City, The Woman Warrior, Song of Solomon, Lost Things, Torn by God, Bastard Out of Carolina, The Man Who Loved Children, The Blind Assassin, One Hundred Years of Solitude, An Imaginary Life, The End Game and Other Stories, To the Lighthouse

Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Jane Hamilton, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Malouf, Christina Stead, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Borges, Julio Cortazar, Amy Tan, Virginia Woolf

While I was attending school at the University of Utah, I was Director of Public Relations at KUED, the public television station for a short while. In the early 80's my husband and I started a technical documentation company, EZ Technology, Inc. We hired a team of Ph.D. students from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and together we wrote, edited, typeset, printed, and packaged documentation for some of the largest computer companies in the united states, and did a fair amount of work in Asia. My husband and I also wrote a number of computer related books for national publishers. Throughout the time we were involved in technical writing, I used my creative writing to "balance" my mind. In the late eighties, my husband took a professorship at a university. I went along to help with the courses, and to work on grants and faculty projects. Somewhere along the way, I completed two Masters degrees. Ten years ago we retired and we have been writing fiction full-time and teaching an advanced weekly fiction writing workshop for the past nine years.

Graduate College/University	California State University, Long Beach, class of
Graduate Area of Study	M.A. in Instructional Design and Multimedia, M.S. in Kinesiology: Sports Medicine
Undergraduate College/University	University of Utah, class of 1983
Undergraduate Area of Study	Bachelor of University Studies: Human Cognition
High School	Jordan High School, class of 1969
Academic Credentials	B.U.S Human Cognition M.A. Instructional Technology and Multimedia M.S. Kinesiology: Sports Medicine/Injury

Just published, Torn by God: A Family's Struggle with Polygamy - A fictional account of events that happened when I was a child when he became interested in polygamy. A second novel, tentatively titled, Man in the Mirror - about a man who is finding himself while he looses himself to Alzheimer's. It is a story with humor. A story about Alzheimer's as a state of enlightenment.

Many authors whose work has a clear voice. Authors such as Jane Hamilton (The Book of Ruth), Bastard out of Carolina, Angela's Ashes, works by Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and even T.C. Boyle in Drop City.