Award-winning Idaho LGBTQ novelist Tom Spanbauer dies at 78

Tom Spanbauer, an author best known for his book "The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon" has passed away at 78.

According to a news release, Spanbauer died of heart failure in Portland after years of battling Parkinson's disease. He was born in 1946 in Pocatello, and he grew up on a farm located 12 miles outside of town.

Spanbauer attended St. Joseph's Catholic School and Highland High School. He achieved a Bachelor's in English Literature at Idaho State University in 1969. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya for two years. After that, he moved back to Idaho until 1978. He has lived in several places including New Hampshire, Vermont and Key West, Florida. He earned his Master's of Fine Arts at Columbia University in 1988.

Spanbauer's novels have been translated into multiple languages and published in several countries throughout the world. Each one focuses on characters coming to terms with their sexual identities and finding family outside their blood relations.

In addition to his novels, he is also the founder of the writing workshop Dangerous Writing, which has inspired several authors, including Chuck Palahniuk, author of "Fight Club" and "Invisible Monsters."

After surviving the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s while living in New York, Spanbauer, who is a gay man, wrote his third novel, "In the City of Shy Hunters," which was a story he believed was his duty to tell. He later wrote in a note about what the story meant to him.

"Shy Hunters is as much about AIDS as Romeo and Juliet is about teen suicide," he wrote. "Shy Hunters is the story of a man searching for his lost love in a world that has gone mad, but it is also an homage to my beloved New York City and to try to tell of the days of the plague and the horror that gay men went through.”

In 1991, Spanbauer moved from New York to Portland where he started his Dangerous Writing workshop, which would continue for over 20 years throughout the world.

In 2002, he met his partner, Michael Sage Ricci, who he proposed to in 2015 during his acceptance speech for the Oregon Library Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Ricci said in the news release that Spanbauer's stories were always about finding family.

"All those queer kids who had no family, he gave them (The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon's) Shed and Ida and all of those characters," he said in the news release.

Spanbauer's gift as a writer was to help others bring out their inner lives and share it with others. He wrote that was the "danger" in Dangerous Writing.

"I must listen for the heartbreak, the rage, the shame, the fear that is hidden within the words," he wrote about teaching workshops. "Then I must respect where each individual student is in relation to his or her broken heart and act accordingly."

Spanbauer won several awards throughout his career, including the 1992 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for best fiction and the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay General Fiction for "I Loved You More."

Toward the end of his life, Spanbauer wrote an essay about his years growing up in Idaho.

“Given all the weirdness of being raised in rural Idaho in the '50s, though, I've got to say that walking the mile home after changing the water (irrigating) on a summer evening — that long solitary walk at sunset down the dusty roads through the sugar beet fields, the alfalfa fields, the barley and wheat fields, was something close to a miracle," he wrote. "Really the connection I felt to the sky and to the earth and to the water created in me a feeling of being connected to an abiding deep mystery. Idaho: such an enigma. But isn’t that what home is? The dreaded place where your heart sings.”