About David Kitzmiller

Writer, author, poet, and songwriter from Indiana

David Kitzmiller has been writing since the age of twelve, when curiosity about words became something closer to a lifeline. Born in Fort Wayne and rooted in Sheridan, Indiana, he currently lives in Indianapolis, where the work continues across literary fiction, memoir, poetry, and music.

His writing covers more ground than recovery. He writes about love in all its complicated forms, loss that lingers past the moment it arrives, friendships that shape a life without announcing themselves, family that defines and sometimes breaks you, and the particular absurdity that surfaces in the middle of the darkest moments. He writes, as he has put it himself, to make you think, to make you remember, to make you cry, and to make you laugh. Usually not in that order.

One symbol runs through the full catalog. Kitzmiller has described it in four words: I am the Toaster. The full meaning of that lives across the books, poetry, and music. The short version is this: the Toaster is ordinary, functional, still running, and capable of more than it appears.

A recipient of Indiana's Own award from Indiana's Own Institute and a six-time Critic's Choice honoree at the Northeastern Poetry Summit, four times in Long Form Free Verse and twice in Short Form, Kitzmiller has built a body of work that refuses to settle into a single form or a single emotional register.

Why Writing

Writing began long before publication, recognition, or any plan for books. It became a place to hold thoughts that resisted explanation and emotions that seemed easier to survive than to describe out loud.

Over time, that practice expanded into forms that each serve a distinct purpose. Memoir offered directness. Literary fiction created room for the question no memoir can quite answer: what if. Poetry compressed experience into something immediate and physical. Music carried what language alone sometimes could not reach.

Kitzmiller's approach to storytelling is deliberately intimate. He writes the way a good host tells a story at a small dinner party. He pulls you in, makes you feel something you did not expect to feel, and leaves you with more than you arrived with. The reader is not the audience. The reader is always the listener at the table.

The Work

Kitzmiller is the creator of the Dealing with the Toaster memoir series, including A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster (2023) and Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom (2024), with additional volumes planned that will explore fatherhood, divorce, and the slower work of the years in between.

His debut literary novel, Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between The Stations, is a tribute to the friends of his youth and the question most people carry quietly into adulthood.

The Poems from the Toaster collections, now in their second volume with more planned, pair original poetry with photography, illustration, and graphic design. Each poem is a fully designed page, not a line on a white background.

His music spans four ongoing series across four distinctly different genres, each one released through Ace of Toaster Records.

Full details on each work are available through the Books and Music pages.

Norman

In 2022, Kitzmiller founded Norman Kitzmiller Publications as the independent home for his books and creative projects. The imprint takes its name from his older brother Norman, born in 1972, gone in 1992.

Norman was a brilliant artist. His paintings and drawings had a beauty that matched the person behind them: warm, quietly observant, someone who absorbed the world carefully and thoroughly. He was not the one who started trouble, though he could look like he might finish it. He had the kind of soul that deserved more time than it was given.

His death by suicide at twenty altered the course of David Kitzmiller's life in ways that are present in nearly every page written since. Naming the imprint after him is not a tribute in the conventional sense. It is closer to a promise to keep going in the direction Norman never got to travel.

The crisis resources listed at the bottom of this page are there because of him.

A Personal Journey

Many of Kitzmiller's projects draw directly from addiction, recovery, trauma, severe depression, and the ongoing work of rebuilding a life that has come apart more than once. Completing Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom required confronting decades of unspoken experience, and the process led to hospitalization in 2025. The work does not come without cost.

That said, Kitzmiller is clear that recovery is one part of the story, not the whole of it. The same person who writes about survival also writes about the ache of loving someone across the wrong kind of distance. About loyalty between old friends. About the strange humor of being alive on a Tuesday when nothing extraordinary is happening. The darkness is real. So is everything that surrounds it.

Creativity, across all the forms it has taken, has been both expression and endurance. The two are not always as different as they sound.

The Road and At Home

Travel has shaped Kitzmiller's perspective in ways that surface quietly throughout both writing and music. Mexico, visited many times across many years, holds a particular place. He has said often that when he retires, he wants to live in a small coastal fishing village somewhere along the Mexican coast, spending his days fixing fishing nets and giving bad life advice to anyone who wanders close enough to ask.

At home, life is shared with family, four dogs, four cats, and firmly held opinions about pizza toppings, which belong above the cheese in every situation except deep dish. The ordinary details matter as much as the dramatic ones. Most lives are built from both, and Kitzmiller has always known which one is harder to write well.

Looking Ahead

Kitzmiller continues expanding his body of work across memoir, literary fiction, poetry, and music. Future memoir volumes will move into the middle years: fatherhood, divorce, and the quieter damage that accumulates between the obvious catastrophes. New volumes of Poems from the Toaster and additional music are in development across all four series. Nameless Cowfish is the beginning of his fiction, not the full extent of it.

The goal has not changed since the age of twelve: to keep following experience closely enough to turn it into something honest.

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