Lars Eighner
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Lars Eighner is the author of Travels with Lizbeth, a memoir of homelessness in the American Southwest during the late 1980s; the included essay "On Dumpster Diving," which is widely anthologized both at full length and in abridged form under the title "My Daily Dives in the Dumpster"; Pawn to Queen Four, a novel; Lavender Blue: How to Write and Sell Gay Men's Erotica, also published as Elements of Arousal; Gay Cosmos, a work of gay theory; and numerous short works of gay men's erotica, collected under various titles.
Lars Eighner was born Laurence Vail Eighner, Thanksgiving day (November 25), 1948, in Corpus Christi, Texas, the son of Alice Elizabeth Vail Eighner (later Harlow) and Lawrence Clifton Eighner, and the grandson of the Texas poets Alice Ewing Vail (The Big Thicket) and John Arthur Vail. He grew up in Houston, Texas, and was graduated from Lamar High School in 1966. He studied creative writing under George Williams of Rice University at the Corpus Christi Fine Arts Colony, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, doing major work in ethnic studies.
Eighner began writing for publication in the early 1980s, and his first book was a collection of short stories, Bayou Boy and Other Stories (Gay Sunshine Press, 1985). In the late 1980s he and his dog Lizbeth became homeless, and his experiences as a homeless person in Austin, Texas; Los Angeles, California, and places in between are the subject of Travels with Lizbeth. Eighner was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 1994.
Eighner has said in alt.usage.english, using the Kirshenbaum representation of pronunciations, that he pronounces his surname /'aI nR/ (IPA: /ˈaɪnər/), though many members of his father's family pronounce it /'&g nR/ (/ˈægnər/).[1]
