Born between blizzards in 1977, Scott William Foley grew up in Beardstown, IL. At the tender age of four, his babysitter introduced him to the magnificent world of comic books and, more specifically, Batman. By five, Foley regularly created his own comic books which his mother and father never failed to mark as the work of a genius.
In fourth grade, Foley’s teacher thrust him into the amazing world of Narnia, and these books, along with his predilection for comics, served as the catalyst for an explosion of the imagination.
By high school, Foley had become a Beardstown Tiger and participated in football, basketball, and track. He also read feverishly, enjoying the work of Wells, Stoker, Shelley, Stevenson, Irving, James, Hugo, and Rice. Amazingly, it would be several years before he discovered King. A chronic doodler, Foley created dozens of characters he dreamt of writing and drawing one day in comic books. Most of them have never been publicly unveiled, but some of them have made it into his modern-day prose.
One of his first publishing opportunities arrived when Foley got upset by an event at school and wrote a poem in order to voice his protest. He sent the poem to the local newspaper, and, as fate would have it, they published it. It probably served to confuse the majority of the town, but it was a neat moment for him.
In 1995, Foley attended Illinois State University, majoring in English. Those years gave his raw imagination its first inkling of structure and nuance, thanks mostly to his creative composition classes and the work of Fitzgerald, Twain, Eliot, Shakespeare, Joyce, Forster, Heller, Burgess, and Rushdie.
During his time at ISU, Foley found another publishing opportunity. Through sheer luck, he landed a job creating comic strips and political cartoons for the school newspaper. His first comic strip was about a bungling superhero called The Adventures of Nut Hut, but, when ideas for Nut Hut waned, Foley created a new strip simply entitled Scooter. Most of Scooter’s escapades were based upon Foley’s own misadventures.
Before graduating from Illinois State University in 1999, Foley decided he wanted to join the ranks of American Literature and thus embarked upon writing his first novel. As do most great authors, he moved into his parents’ basement and expanded upon a short story he’d written during college. He substitute taught during the day and wrote at night. Within six months he’d finished the first draft of Souls Triumphant. It would be five more years before it saw print.
As Foley sought to publish Souls Triumphant, he joined his brother in North Carolina, taking a high school teaching job in Gaston County. Foley’s writing essentially came to a stop during this time as he struggled to adapt to real life. However, he discovered Stephen King and Neil Gaiman while in the South, and these two writers continue to influence Foley’s work to this day.
Two years later, Foley returned to Central Illinois where he joined the faculty of Bloomington High School. Things began to move fast for Foley after the move, for within a few months he met his future wife–Kristen–and started writing monthly short stories for a local website.
In July of 2004, Kristen experienced mild lunacy and married Foley, ensuring herself a lifetime of editing her husband’s work and cheering him on. At times, she also has to execute tough love and bring Foley’s feet back to the ground. Foley is the man he wants to be thanks to Kristen’s love.
Foley collected his numerous short stories and released them in a book called The Imagination’s Provocation: Volume I in January of 2005. This short story collection delivers horror, humor, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and even a little bit of inspirational fiction.
Because of The Imagination’s Provocation: Volume I’s victories, Foley decided to finally release his novel, Souls Triumphant, in June of 2005. After five long years of nurturing this book, Foley was elated when it found an audience who appreciated its mixed genres. Drawing heavily from Christian theology and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Souls Triumphant is about angels and demons, action and adventure, love and loss, as well as failure and redemption. Perhaps one of Foley’s proudest moments occurred when Mr. Randy Reichert taught Souls Triumphant alongside Fitzgerald and Faulkner in his course, The Novel, through Lincoln Land Community College.
Because things were going so well, Foley plowed ahead and released a second short story collection aptly entitled The Imagination’s Provocation: Volume II in August of 2006. Like its predecessor, this compilation features stories immensely different in genre, tone, and setting. However, they each deal with that which we all have in common–our humanity. These tales feature love, regret, defeat, hope, fear, and salvation.
In October of 2007, a local periodical called News & Views for the Young At Heart hired him as its monthly short story writer. He wrote for them from that month to December of 2009. Though written for the senior citizen, Foley endeavored to make each and every one of his stories enjoyable and thought-provoking for readers of any age.
Without a doubt, Foley’s greatest moment came in July of 2008, when he and Kristen were blessed with a beautiful baby girl. Foley decided to take a leave of absence from his teaching career to be a stay-at-home daddy, and he loved every minute of it.
In the summer of 2010, Foley released a philosophical science-fiction novel entitled Andropia. Dr. Jane Thomas of the University of Michigan said about it: “Andropia is in some ways subversive, in many ways disturbing, and in all ways a thoroughly good read!” It details two outcasts striving to make sense of a world in which they are not allowed to question.
In the fall of 2010, Foley returned to teaching and began his Master’s in Reading. He has never enjoyed teaching more in his life, and is honored to be a role model to young men and women.
Finally, in the spring of 2011, Foley began an eighteen-part serialized story through the Amazon Kindle. Released every two months, Dr. Nekros follows the odyssey of a ghost hunter encumbered by his ex-wife and haunted car as he seeks vengeance against the demon Xaphan.
You can find Foley at his website (www.scottwilliamfoley.com), Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon.com. Along with his fiction, he enjoys writing book and movie reviews. Feel free to get in touch with him at scottwilliamfoley@gmail.com. Foley currently enjoys reading Chabon, Proulx, Auster, Wolff, McCarthy, and anything with Batman in it.
