DAVID KITZMILLER LITERARY PORTFOLIO

The Norman Kitzmiller Publications Collection

The "Dealing with the Toaster" Biographical Timeline

The Dealing with the Toaster biographical timeline chronicles the arc of a life from its earliest high-friction chapters, through volatile adolescent environments, and into the ongoing work of adult reconstruction. Designed to be read sequentially but operating as powerful standalone releases, each volume intentionally pushes into psychological territory the previous book could not reach. 

Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom

Kitzmiller’s first memoir begins in the fractured terrain of childhood—a place shaped by three defining moments that ignited his obsession with words, music, and meaning. From Melissa Manchester drifting through a box fan in 1979, to a yard-sale poem that lodged itself permanently in his mind, to the shockwave of Purple Rain completely rewriting his eleven-year-old internal monologue, these early experiences formed the blueprint of a writer long before he understood what writing could hold.

Told in a reflective, documentary style that gradually shifts into a more immediate voice, Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom traces the origins of the narrative mind. The pages reveal the early wounds, the first sparks of creativity, and the emotional machinery that shaped a life spent trying to understand love, pain, memory, and the chaos inside his own head.

Coming Soon: Playing with a Toaster by the Bathtub

The third memoir in the series examines the years shaped by Kitzmiller’s two marriages. Written with the same clarity and unfiltered honesty as the earlier volumes, Playing with a Toaster by the Bathtub traces the emotional terrain of partnership, fracture, and the long arc of learning who we become inside and outside of commitment. It continues the autobiographical timeline with a steady, reflective focus on the moments that defined those years.

The Root Medium

Poems from the Toaster: (Volume I, II and III)

The Poems from the Toaster collections act as the visceral emotional undercurrent of the entire catalog. While the prose volumes document chronological timelines, the poetry isolates the raw fragments living between the chapters—capturing isolated flashes of rage, intense tenderness, sharp absurdity, and the heavy quiet that follows a fracture.

Awarded Critic's Choice honors at the Northeastern Poetry Summit, each volume pairs roughly ninety pieces with striking graphic design, photography, and custom illustration. This deliberate design turns every page into an immersive visual asset, engineered to function perfectly alongside the memoirs or stand completely on its own.

The Speculative Narrative Extensions

Fiction opens entirely new territory, exploring the deep “what if” questions that exist outside the biographical timeline. These works expand the catalog beyond lived experience while remaining fiercely connected to its underlying emotional truth.

Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between The Stations

Kitzmiller’s debut novel steps outside the autobiographical timeline while remaining rooted in the emotional terrain that shaped it. Inspired by a real garage band that lasted only a few months, Nameless Cowfish, the book expands those early memories into a thirty-year story set in Sheridan, Indiana—a small town where the people you find become your whole world because, for a while, they actually are.

The novel begins with the magnificent stupidity of teenage conviction: believing that loudness is talent, that noise is progress, and that fame is simply a matter of planning. The band in the book gets good—something the real Nameless Cowfish never did—but the emotional truth remains the same. It captures the feeling of standing in a garage with people you love, making noise that sounds like something, believing that the something is going to take you somewhere. That feeling becomes the engine of the story.

Coming Soon: 5 Habits of Highly Successful Murderers

Kitzmiller’s upcoming novel dives into a dark, sharply funny collision of horror, romance, and crime. 5 Habits of Highly Successful Murderers follows Celeste and Kyle—a bored Indiana couple who decide to try a viral “how-to” murder video the same way most people try a TikTok recipe. What begins as a joke spirals into something far stranger, pulling them into a national spotlight they never asked for and definitely aren’t prepared to handle.

Equal parts deadpan comedy and unflinching chaos, the book moves through obsession, performance, and the stories people build when they think the world is watching. It’s messy, unsettling, unexpectedly intimate—and unlike anything else in the Toaster Universe.

The Editorial Style

The Author's Intent