BIO/PHILOSOPHY


I grew up on a horse ranch in Alabama. Our barn was big, but our house was small, just a converted trapper's shack on a lake with a fireplace and a wood-burning stove. I've been a bouncer and bartender in some of the roughest joints in NJ (and some of the nicest restaurants in NYC). I've ridden a motorcycle for almost forty years. My current bike is a Vulcan Classic. I'm married and have an eleven-year-old son named Xan. I live in an old house on a hill in Highland Park. My attic office looks like a cross between the top floor in Knives Out and Gruncle Stan's Mystery Shack. I teach two creative writing classes, informally known as Wonder 101 and Worry 101. I helm RU's Creative Writing Study Abroad program to England. I also run my own winter break workshop/adventure retreat called Winter is Here. Every year, I take a dozen young authors to write/workshop fantasy fiction some evocative, far flung locale. Scotland, Northern Ireland, Iceland, etc. Fire festivals, Stonehenge, Giant's Causeway, Dark Hedges and Kirjufell. We just got back from Switzerland. I used to own a bookstore and performance venue called The Raconteur. My pandemic project was building a mobile bookshop on the back of a flatbed farm truck called The Rac-On-Tour (get it?). It lives in Highland Park. I'm a licensed Central Park carriage driver and a certified international tour guide. I have a few books coming out. My memoir, Room to Swing an Axe, about growing up in 80's Alabama, has been called "a Johnny Cash song directed by Steven Spielberg," and my novel, Welcome to White Hart, has been called "Charlotte's Web meets Winter's Bone." Both books are due out this year.


TEACHING PHILOSOPHY:

I remember sitting on our back porch listening to my stepfather and his friends, men with names like Bud and Bubba and Bo, tell stories. How they passed that boxy bottle of Beam. I remember the wipe and sip. How they used their sleeves. If a story was good, it would get quiet quick, and you could hear the clink of their buttons on the bottle mouth. The tick of the moth on the bare, porch bulb. Story after story. How an alligator ate a hunting dog. How the kudzu swallowed a pickup truck in less than a week. A buck with thirty points. A piebald doe. A fifty pound buffalo fish caught in the tailwaters of Wilson Dam. Bud saw a cigar shaped formation of lights over his lake. Bo heard an infant wail in the tall haunted grass of Cry Baby Hollow. Southern men can talk, and I remember the language. The lingo. The verbal music. No one said "hot" or "cold" or "clear as day." They said "devil's armpit" and "tin toilet seat" and "clear as balls on a tall dog." I remember how the stories moved. Full tilt. If a story didn’t move, grab you up front, the other men would just start talking over it. The words of literary fiction hold up signs that say “Look at me, I’m beautiful.” The words of commercial fiction hold up signs that say, “Don’t look at me, look ahead.” I want words that hold up both signs. I want student work that is both lyrical and active, like the stories of Bubba and Bud and bo, I want work that is propulsive AND finely written. 

I like werewolves and mermaids and talking dragons. 

I sometimes hear fellow instructors complaining about a particular kind of student story. The zombie apocalypse. The alien invasion. The unethical science experiment gone wrong. They erect bans. No zombies, they say. Send them my way, I say. 

I’m a coach not a judge. I believe in the student’s dominion over their own work. Writers first, students second. My job, as I see it, is not to change (or, indeed, appraise) the way they write, but to understand, through close review of submitted material and conference discussion, what they’re trying to achieve, to identify what’s in their way, and to help them remove it. To that end, submissions are not returned with “edits," but instead discussed and unpacked at one-on-one sessions, during which we jointly interrogate the work. My objective is not to “fix” any one story, but rather to enhance a student’s overall writing (and clarify their creative intentions), and, as such, I’m not interested in students revising their work in close accordance with my comments. Indeed, I regularly caution students against blind application (or, of course, rejection) of conference and workshop critiques.

While my classes have many traditional components, I do what I can to preserve a note (more than a note) of surprise. We go on field trips. We walk in the woods. We play music. We eat food. Sometimes we get up and dance. My writing prompts are visual, tactual, sonic, olfactive, immersive. We visit with authors and industry professionals (Lev Grossman, for instance, has Skyped with my classes some two dozen times and visited in person four times), but also with what can only be called “circus folk.” (Watching someone upgrade from a mousetrap on the tongue to a rat trap on the finger, a beaver trap on the hand, and, ultimately, a serrated bear trap on the leg is a pretty unforgettable lesson in ratcheting tension and creating suspense.) A lot of my students write Sword and Sorcery (S&S), a subgenre of fantasy characterized by single combat, and I regularly bring in armored Ren Faire fighters (and sometimes a blacksmith) to demonstrate/field questions regarding medieval weaponry.

I believe the way to wonder (and beauty and terror) is through novelty. I prefer immersion to translation. I like writing that is horizontal and vertical, forward moving and down reaching. I want scenes that are bumpy and noisy. I want stories that stink. I believe in getting down the crazy crap that’s in your head. But I believe, too, that writing is an act of invention, not transcription, a journey of discovery and surprise. The story becomes what it is, tells you want it wants to be, through the act of writing. The path is made by walking.

I encourage students to take chances. To delineate between caution and care. Write with diligence, certainly, examine every word, but be bold. Be brave and tricky. Take risks. Write want you want to write, but write, too, what you NEED to write, what you’re AFRAID to write. I believe in dangerous writing. In truth and broken hearts. In prospecting your personal battles, the things that won’t leave you alone.


I believe in writing what you know, what you’re obsessed with and curious about, what preoccupies you. But I believe, too, in “radical empathy.” Creating characters that are nothing like you. Exploring and rendering lives entirely different from your own.

I don’t believe in the puritanical grind. That good is achieved only through difficult, exhausting labor. I believe in joyful effort, in helping a student create a project that captivates them. I grew up on a ranch in Alabama. I had a black pacer named Midnight. Midnight was my horse, and I remember long days in the paddock teaching it to lead. I knew they were long, not because I was watching any kind of clock, but because when I was done, it was dark. I remember how my friend and I would lose days to rebuilding motorcycles. His dad had a bike shop. There was a poster next to the scissor lift: “Work Willingly and Build Cool Stuff.” My mission is to get a student invested enough in their own project -- enthralled, even -- to continue working on it over winter and summer break. 

I believe in vocal publishing and sonic thinking. The profound difference between how a sentence sounds and its mute presence on the page. I want words that clamp down and stick like Bubba’s story about Cry Baby Hollow. 

I believe in the practical product of craft i.e. the story, the poem, the book. I believe in putting your work where at least one stranger can encounter it. I believe a writer must have at least one reader (or, indeed, a listener) like a magician must have one person watching. The reader fills the story with wonder just as the spectator turns the trick into magic. I believe in tools not rules. And if there are rules, I believe they can be followed poorly and broken beautifully. I believe in creating a writing regiment and keeping to it. Whether it be fifteen minutes every morning or five hours Sunday night. I believe in fires, not buckets. I believe in manic first drafts. In writing fast, writing like you stole it, and daring the keys, the little licks of light, to keep up. I believe in outrunning the bastards. I believe in drive. 

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