About

Greg Venne argues he is not obsessed with not being Catholic any longer. In the long process of leaving a faith, however, he became intrigued with the many moral issues. Consequently, his fictional family, the Prevetts, is entangled in human desires, natural goodness, and creeds in abundance.

“The Catholics brought you to the dance. And your first dance is with your mother. And it’s a long and slow dance. She teaches you so many steps. She’s passionate. You become passionate too. Then the band starts to play different music, new music to you, but new music to your mother as well.”

Greg Venne wrote these words for Babe Prevett, the youngest son of Will and Nata Prevett. Will is the second son of Steven and Gwendoline Prevett. Steven is the second son of Henri and Sybylle Prevett. Twelve years after his birth at the very end of the Civil War, Henri and his older brother walked from the far eastern regions of Canada into Racine, Wisconsin. Venne too is a descendant of Catholic French Canadians.

Venne can draw a somewhat similar family tree to that of his fictional family, the Prevetts of Twin Pines, Wisconsin. He has sat at the feet of a host of Great Aunts who never married. He listened to his father and to his mother describe hard times. “One time all my mother had in our little shack was five kids and a bag of beans.” Venne’s mother held her hands no more that six inches apart, making a frame for the lone bag of beans. With tedious detail, Venne recalls funeral after funeral, all punctuated by the smell and the sound of the Funeral Mass.

With a label used generations before, Venne himself would be described as “fallen away.” Most all his writing chafes against that rub. When the “fallen” gather at a party and begin the individual stories, Venne explains he is more apt to remain silent and listen.

Going to college resulted from a stroke of luck when a new union contract allowed Venne’s father to lend him $300 a year. The rest Venne made working in a grocery store. From the stock room to the classroom came easy in 1970. Teachers of that era assimilated to the social upheaval with sincere aspirations and high energy.

To fill out the last decade of his teaching career, Venne directed the Writing Center for the University of Wisconsin, Marathon Campus. Between student conferences, he filled notebooks with verbal sketches, a few short stories, and rambling notes on novels-to-be.

Venne has three novels available on Amazon.com. Three more will be added in the next two months.