Dean Bakopoulos didn't go to the moon, but he did go to Iowa, and there's a story there. Anyone who knows how much this acclaimed author, the first director of the Wisconsin Book Festival, loves the Madison area knows there must be.

It's a story that recalls Hemingway's line that a writer's life is like playing sandlot second base - the ball can take some bad hops.

Lately it had bounced and hit Bakopoulos in the nose, or skidded under his glove.

The author of "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon" - a novel called "original and brilliant" by Lorrie Moore and selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2005 - had struggled through several drafts of his second novel. Then, a year ago, just as Bakopoulos was hitting the finish line, his publisher, Harcourt, which had recently merged with Houghton Mifflin, downsized and put existing book contracts on hold. Bakopoulos's editor left amid the turmoil.

That was bad enough, but a month earlier, Bakopoulos had left his position as executive director and artist in residence at the Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point. The recession had hit Shake Rag pretty hard. In leaving, Bakopoulos was counting on the new book, which, suddenly, was delayed. With a wife and two kids, Bakopoulos, 34, was suddenly in a tough spot.

Fortunately, the ball takes good hops, too.

This fall, Bakopoulos started a new job as a tenure track assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University in Ames. Students are encouraged to infuse their stories with a recognition of the influence of place and the natural world.

"I love teaching," Bakopoulos was saying Wednesday, and he's especially excited about the unique program at Iowa State, which he said "blends the craft of writing with an environmental ethic. The kind of thing Aldo Leopold talked about."

As sometimes happens, just as Bakopoulos's "day job" fortunes were rising, his publishing fortunes took an uptick as well.

The second novel, titled "My American Unhappiness," is finished and tentatively scheduled for fall 2010 publication by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Set in Madison, largely on the near West Side, it's a dark comedy in which Madisonians will recognize many names and places.

For the final edit of the manuscript, Bakopoulos has reunited with the editor who published his first story back in 2001. The story which grew into "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon" was published in the summer of that year by Francis Coppola's magazine, Zoetrope: All Story. The editor, Adrienne Brodeur, is now Dean's editor at Harcourt.

That first novel was set in a Detroit suburb, the same area where Bakopoulos grew up. He came to Madison with his wife, Lodi native Amanda Okopski, in 1997 after attending the University of Michigan. Bakopoulos got an MFA from UW-Madison - Moore directed his thesis - and worked at Canterbury Booksellers as a book buyer.

He loved that job, in part because he often enticed visiting authors - Richard Russo, Kent Haruf and others - into a booth at Nick's on State Street for a drink and a chat about writing.

After Canterbury, Bakopoulos wound up at the Wisconsin Humanities Council, where he initiated the Wisconsin Book Festival. Eventually he felt the job was keeping him from his writing, and he left for Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point.

Teaching at Iowa State, he has found time for other projects. There's a TV series based on "Please Don't Come Home From the Moon" in the works, and a full-length play, "You Have No Idea," that will debut on Mineral Point's Alley Stage in June 2010. And Bakopoulos and his family are having fun exploring Ames.

"It's a neat little town," he said.

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