Welcome! All of the sadness in the world, all of the aimlessness you feel when you sit at your desk and pretend to work, all of the empty hours that you have been trying to forget or to fill, and you landed here at my web site, constructed for the publication of my first book, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, just released in paperback by Harcourt. May this be cause for great joy!

The web site contains photos of Maple Rock, the setting of this book, which is not really a place. I made it up. But the photos are all real, because Maple Rock is based on the places I knew growing up in and around Detroit, especially a stretch of Michigan Avenue between Lonyo and Livernois, where my family went to church, and the Warrendale neighborhood, where my grandparents lived. Maple Rock also includes some details of the suburbs of Wayne County, especially Dearborn Heights, Livonia, Westland, and Redford. When I return to these places, my heart jangles around in my chest, half-happy and half-distraught, and I swear I will never leave again. But I do. I live in Wisconsin now. If you’ve never been to the blue state of Wisconsin, that is okay, but you should consider a visit, because I say without hesitation that it is the greatest place on the planet.

Please tool around the site and read about my book, check out my events schedule, and find out about stuff so cool it gives you heartburn in the TASTE section. And come back often for new material, additional tour information, ironic and self-deprecatory banter, and much, much more!

Dean will be teaching a writing workshop at magical Shake Rag Alley in his new hometown of Mineral Point, WI. Click here for more workshop details.

And the magazine Real Simple has a special issue about "Family" on newstands until October. Dean has an essay in it—a letter to his two-year-old daughter.

Dean Bakopoulos
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