George Foy

George Michelsen Foy (also known as Georges Foy and G.F. Michelsen) is a French-American novelist, essayist, and magazine journalist, and professor of creative writing. He has published 12 novels, seven under his own name and five under the nom de plume G.F. Michelsen. Until February 2010, the author kept secret the Michelsen persona’s real identity.

Career

As a professor of creative writing at NYU, Foy/Michelsen earns his living in part by explaining fiction’s “rules” to his students; as a novelist, apparently, he knows how to break them. In an essay about literary theory (writing as Georges Michelsen), he notes that when he edited The Art and Practice of Explosion, the book seemed to him to come to a different conclusion from what he’d intended while writing it. The secret it revealed was different from the one he thought he’d hidden. The novel had assumed, as the cliché has it, a will of its own.

The essay encapsulates Foy/Michelsen’s literary theory: “I hold a belief that every novel constitutes a story-world, built by the author in collaboration with the reader. . . . Much of the thrill of reading comes from the fact that a well made story-world . . . is as uncontrollable as Frankenstein’s creation. It’s an unguided missile, an independent tool. It will and must work in ways its author cannot control.”