Not The Sharpest Tool
The site belonging to writer-like person Alex Sheshunoff
Copyright 2008-2014 Alex Sheshunoff
The highlight - and lowlight - of that period was a 28,000 mile cross-country promotional bus tour Alex took to hawk the company and its message. Though the trip was covered by The New York Times, Forbes, CNN and heaps of other outlets, his favorite headline was from the Austin American Statesman: “New Web Site Offers Access to Government, Bar-Be-Que.”
Five years after starting the company, burnt out, and facing a quasi quarter-life crises, Alex gathered the hundred books he was most embarrassed not to have read in college and moved to a small island in the Pacific. There, he read his books, met a woman he’d later marry, and built a house on a remote island with a dozen friends. He later wrote a book about the experience, A Beginner's Guide to Paradise, and got to rewrite that book while getting a masters degree in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa.
Because of his unique last name, Alex is often asked if he's somehow related to Ian Shenanigan Sheshunoff, the first-place winner of the Diaper Derby Crawling Contest at the 2008 Alaska State Fair. They are indeed related. Ian is his son. Today, Alex and his wife, Sarah, live in Ojai, California with Ian and his equally talented younger brother, Andrew Commissioner. There, Sarah works as a public defender which, in practice, means representing guilty but overcharged criminals. And Alex works as a freelance writer which, for him, means checking email about a hundred times a day.
That book, A Beginner's Guide to Paradise will be published by Penguin Random House in the fall of 2015. In the unlikely event you don't check here weekly for updates, let me know your email address and I'll send you a note when it comes out. And I promise not to share your address with anyone - that would be really bad cyber karma.
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Alex Sheshunoff is a freelance writer of sorts whose work has appeared in National Geographic Adventure, Slate, Marketplace on National Public Radio, and other very prestigious media outlets. Before deciding to call himself a writer, Alex snuck through Yale and started and ran an Internet company in New York called E-The People - a nonpartisan precursor to Moveon.org, but with a pun in its name.
