David Kitzmiller writes to make you feel something. The Indiana-based author, poet, and songwriter turns lived experience into literary fiction, memoir, poetry, and music without looking away from what that experience actually cost. He writes about love, loss, survival, friendship, heartbreak, and the absurd humor that surfaces in the middle of all of it.
Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between The Stations is Kitzmiller's debut novel and something closer to a love letter to the friends of his youth. Set across thirty years in small-town Indiana, it follows a garage band's unlikely journey and asks the question most people carry quietly into adulthood: what if we had kept going? The personalities are real. Some of the stories may be too.
The Dealing with the Toaster series begins where most memoirs are afraid to: at the very bottom. Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom traces the origins of Kitzmiller's deepest wounds from childhood through the hardest years of adolescence. A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster comes years later, when a weekend in Sydney, Australia reminded him that the world still had color in it. These are not stories of tidy recovery. They are stories of what it looks like to keep going anyway.
Poems from the Toaster is not a traditional poetry collection. Each of the roughly ninety poems in every volume is a fully designed page, pairing words with photographs, illustrations, and graphics chosen to meet the poem where it lives. The range runs from raw and confrontational to tender and romantic to genuinely funny. A six-time Critic's Choice winner at the Northeastern Poetry Summit, Kitzmiller writes poetry designed to do what the best of it always does: arrive fast and stay long.
Music came before the writing and has never fully left. Kitzmiller's songs are tied to specific moments in his life, personal enough that he chose to keep them rather than license them away to commercial music. Working with a rotating cast of studio musicians, he records in the genre each song demands: singer/songwriter, heavy metal and industrial, smooth dream pop through a female vocal lens, and straight country. The range is deliberate. It has always been about the moment, the lyric, and the voice behind it.
For questions, collaboration inquiries, or to reach David directly, the contact page is the place to start. If you are here because you are struggling, know that you are not alone. Crisis resources are listed on the About page.
