Raised in Baltimore, Maryland, on a steady diet of magical realism, literary fiction, science-fiction, and Spider-Man comics, Harrison Demchick spent most of his formative years inside his own head, working out strange thoughts and ideas that would eventually make their way into stories, screenplays, and songs.

He went to Oberlin College to attain one of modern day’s most notoriously useless degrees, a BA in English with a creative writing concentration, but then actually used it, working the last seven years as a book editor. Harrison is also a screenwriter, and the winner of the 2011 Baltimore Screenwriters Competition.

The Listeners was born in an independent study in fiction during Harrison’s senior semester at Oberlin. Originally a series of interconnected short stories, it was adapted first into a screenplay, and then, from the screenplay, into his first novel. Harrison hopes ardently that The Listeners will catch on in such a way that he doesn’t have to market it.