Recently, as part of its series, "Maryland Presents", the University of Maryland University College Asia (UMUC Asia) sponsored a community event that featured author F.L. Logan and his newest novel Big Motorcycle: A Story of Tokyo. Attendees enjoyed an evening of selected readings and discussion at the Yokota Officer's Club.

Fritz Logan was born in Burlington, Iowa and grew up in suburban Chicago. Having abandoned his first profession, banking, he studied writing with the poet Gwendolyn Brooks at Elmhurst College, with the novelist Joyce Carol Oates at the University of Windsor, and with the writer and critic M. L. Ross at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. There, in 1974, Fritz received his doctorate and then taught for a decade.

Since then he has worked, as a writer / editor / teacher, in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Japan. He taught his first class for UMUC - Asia in 1986. In the years following he has written a few books or portions thereof and quite a few stories and articles. These fifty-or-so magazine pieces (in Tokyo Journal, Intersect, Kyoto Journal, and many of the other Pacific Rim periodicals) concern life in Asia, which continues to fascinate him.

The novel Big Motorcycle began in 1985. Fritz was running along the Tamagawa, near the town of Tamareien, the river to his left and a high stone wall, topped by a railing, to his right. An odd, rhyming thought popped into his sweaty head: What would you do if a baby came sailing over that railing? Immediately he answered his own question: No baby is going to come sailing over that railing. And of course none did. But he couldn't leave the question alone, and, over the next decade, he became host to several dozen imaginary characters, some grotesque and many eccentric and most with some connection to the baby and all with their own stories. These he slowly wove together, rewrite after rewrite, into Big Motorcycle.