Extended Biography

By the time Chris Crutcher was born in Dayton, Ohio on July 17, 1946, his father John (also known as “Crutch”) had decided to leave his career in the United States Air Force behind.  After piloting more than 30 successful B-17 bombing missions in World War II, Crutch was ready to settle down with his family in his wife Jewel’s hometown of Cascade, Idaho.

So the pilot and the housewife bundled up six-week-old baby Chris and his 2 ½-year-old brother John (sister Candy came four years later) and headed for the rural Pacific Northwest to run a service station and wholesale oil business with Jewel’s father.  It was a setting that helped define Crutcher’s human perspective and his critically acclaimed body of work.

Like the town of Trout, Idaho described in Crutcher’s first book Running Loose, Cascade was a sparsely populated mountain logging town – a village that patiently endured the quick temper and voracious curiosity apparent during most of Crutcher’s childhood. It was also a small town that celebrated extracurricular sports.

“If you could breathe,” Crutcher says, “you could play.”  In fact, the recruitment of nearly every male adolescent in Cascade was necessary to populate a viable team. His brother John was an authentic jock and a stellar academic.  But even without athletic prowess, Crutcher participated in football, basketball and track.

When he wasn’t at school or practice, Crutcher often manned the pumps at the family service station, where he learned the value of hard work, the ecstasy of junk food, and the true reach of his father’s powerful intellect.  “I saw him as a God,” Crutcher explains, “but he was 6’5” so I also saw him as BIG.” 

With logic and common sense as his guideposts, Crutch tutored his youngest son on everything from religion to the physics of relativity to political ideals.  Crutcher still remembers the day they added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and his Republican father’s objection to blurring the crucial line between church and state.

Crutcher’s mother Jewel softened his father’s pragmatic influence with her sense of humor, her love of music and her more traditional take on Christian faith.  But as a functional alcoholic, she also introduced her son to the disabling impact of addiction and unspoken pain.

A loving relationship with both parents helped Crutcher refine his ability to think and feel, but not his ability to excel in school. Stealing brother John’s secret stash of straight A book reports, humor and boyish charm got Crutcher through high school and into Eastern Washington State College with a solid C average and just one classic novel under his reader’s belt – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. 

Four years later, Crutcher emerged with a BA in sociology and psych, but no salable skills. So he went back to get his teaching credential and, soon after, taught in Washington State and in Northern California, where The Crazy Horse Electric Game was eventually set.

In the early 1970’s, as the director of Oakland, California’s Lakeside School (a racially diverse, k-12 alternative program), Crutcher came face to face with his professional destiny and the vibrant, often courageous community that would provide years of inspiration for his fictional work. 

When Crutcher left Lakeside in 1981 and settled in Spokane, Running Loose was already written, but he still needed a job.  So he applied for a position with the Spokane Community Health Center and Child Protection team, where he saw his therapeutic abilities take flight.

Crutcher still works as a therapist and child protection advocate. His life experiences in rural Idaho, in urban Oakland, in education and in mental health keep his fiction rooted in real life. “Crutcher writes with heart-wrenching realism,” according to People Magazine with “superb plotting, extraordinary characters and crackling narrative,” Publisher’s Weekly said.

In his personal life, Crutcher enjoys running, swimming, music and basketball.  He lectures 30 to 40 times a year at schools, universities and conferences across the country and around the world.  He has contributed articles to Voices from the Middle, Family Energy Magazine, The Signal Journal and Spokane Magazine. He has had short stories published in seven anthologies including On the Fringe edited by Donald R. Gallo and Dirty Laundry edited by Lisa Rowe Fraustino.  He has also written an adult suspense novel, The Deep End, which is currently being adapted as a major motion picture, as are his novels Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Whale Talk and The Crazy Horse Electric Game. 

The American Library Association has named eight of his young adult books, to date, “Best Books for Young Adults,” and four of his books appeared on Booklist’s Best 100 Books of the 20th Century, compiled in 2000 – more than any other single author on the list.  Crutcher received the ALAN Award in 1993, the NCTE SLATE Intellectual Freedom Award in 1998, the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and Writer Magazine’s Writers Who Make a Difference Award in 2004.

Selected Works by Chris Crutcher

Running Loose, 1983; Stotan!, 1986; The Crazy Horse Electric Game, 1987; Chinese Handcuffs, 1989; Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories, 1991; The Deep End, 1991; Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, 1993; Ironman, 1995; Whale Talk, 2001; King of the Mild Frontier, 2003; The Sledding Hill, 2005, Deadline, 2007.