Frederic S. Durbin was born in rural Taylorville, Illinois.
Throughout his childhood, he was active in getting muddy, lost, and injured—as well as creative and interpretive literary performances, writing, puppetry, vocal and instrumental music, and film-making. Highlights from those days included portrayals of Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Edwards, and William Shakespeare for the Taylorville schools and for the Christian County Historical Museum; leading roles in high school productions of Give My Regards to Broadway (lovable gangster “Legs” Ruby), Calamity Jane (Lt. Danny Gilmartin), and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (Snoopy); and studying with authors Paul Darcy Boles and Madeleine L’Engle at the Blooming Grove Writers’ Conferences at Illinois Wesleyan University, and with author/Professor Jackie Jackson of Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illinois. Durbin was elected commencement speaker by his graduating class at Taylorville High School.

He attended Concordia College (now University) in River Forest, Illinois, where he majored in classical languages. Also at Concordia, he served as chapel cantor and sacristan, worked as an international resident assistant, and edited “Musings,” the creative writing section of the college newspaper. Through the Lutheran Association of Missionaries and Pilots, he spent his college summers helping with vacation Bible schools in remote Cree and Ojibwa villages in northern Ontario, Canada. He graduated summa cum laude and traveled to Japan as a part of the Overseas Volunteer Youth Ministry program of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Initially working with ESL students ranging in age from two to eighty-something, he moved on from volunteer service in 1995 to teach solely at Japan’s Niigata University, where he conducts courses in writing and English conversation. He is a frequent speaker on the joys and practical aspects of fiction writing.

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