Joshua Converse's Blog, page 4

Fire in the Belly

There are days when I think writing is benevolent, altruistic, even idealistic. Other days I suspect writers like me of selfishness, narcissism, and egotism. I wonder what makes us think anyone cares to read what we write? Who are we to dream of posterity? Who am I to presume on a reader’s time?

And then there are other days when I think that writers write because they have to. There’s no good or bad about it. You can’t fault a man for eating when he’s hungry or sleeping when he’s tired–so you can’t fault a writer for writing. It’s just that basic and that imperative. I am not exaggerating. Writers go haywire when unable to write. Just ask Hemingway…

We write because we have something to say in the moment, yes, but it continues because it’s a chronic need to express something. The words are a vehicle for something else that we keep bleeding into the ether all our lives, trying to finally make something known. Maybe to others. Maybe to ourselves. Maybe just to the world that will march on when we are dust, but ultimately, I think we write because of a fire in the belly that never goes away no matter how many words appear on the page…

Inspiration, Biography, and Interpretation.

I have been thinking lately about where inspiration comes from and what that might mean. I never saw it as a problem before, but maybe it is…

Let me back up.

I was asked to come and read some of my poetry in a Creative Writing class recently. After I’d read some of the students naturally had questions about process. How do I come up with material? How do I decide what to write about? On the one hand, I can say I get ideas from the things and people around me. I have written a good deal of poetry about events that took place in my life. Admitting that, though, feels a bit dangerous because it opens one up to all kinds of biographical interpretations. I hope the poem stands alone and has enough universality (or inspires sufficient empathy) that anyone can be inside that poem for a moment and look through the poem’s eyes. Not my eyes. The poem’s eyes. Wherever it came from and whatever inspired it and whatever aspects of my life might be inside a given poem or story, I hope it never gets reduced to something “about me.” I think all literary art is independent of all literary artists, or at least that’s how I want it to be.

The other half of this line of thought comes out of a book I’m reading. A biography of Ernest Hemingway, in fact. So much of what he writes is critically interpreted according to his biography, and perhaps that approach does shed some light, but I think it’s a slippery slope. While Green Hills of Africa might well be a fictionalized account of Hemingway’s trip there, that information is entirely superfluous to the appreciation of that particular work of art as a work of art.

I wonder if it’s not better for us to focus less on the particulars of an author and more on the discrete and particular wholeness of each piece of art he produces.

That, at least, is how I would like people to read what I write.

My Fearful Guests: A Field Guide to the Bats in my Belfry.

If you will let me, I shall give you a paper to read. It is long, but I have typewritten it out. It will tell you of my trouble… 

- Mina Harker

There is a vampire in my house. I know. I invited him in. 

I decided to write my Masters thesis on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Now he’s hanging bat-fashion over my desk, leering at me. His red eyes glitter in the gloom and dare me to write about him. Of a morning he scratches at the  window panes from outside in the fog. In truth, I’m not what he’s after.

On the contrary, I’m the one who is after him. He has the answers I want, but he’s not talking. Not directly anyway. He’s a figure of legend; a superstition. A folk tale. A fireside yarn.They are subject to different rules than the characters of Fielding or Austen. Oral figures are nearly immutable at the outset, changing only slowly if at all–and yet when rendered typographic they become strangely pliable in the hands of an author charged with the vague expectation or directive of originality.

What is the essence of the vampire? Stoker’s vampire may move about by day. He must drink the blood of the living to sustain himself, and yet he seems to go on for ages with little of that to subsist on in his Castle. He reads English books and disguises himself, but these are mere illusions; what he really is at his core is far older than the pages that try to stake him down. He is oral story, and oral story may alter over time, but the individual teller telling his story is not at liberty to simply change what he will. The wine-dark sea is never anything but wine-dark.  

The ghost in my house, though, has left clues for me to follow if I dare. 

Yes. There’s a ghost, too. He seems to accompany the vampire; a shadow for the shadowless. His name was Bram Stoker. He died of syphilis in 1912, poor and miserable. But he knows the vampire. And he’s whispering through the keyhole of his novel, his recently unearthed notes and his myriad biographies. He says so much that I’m not asking for, and I keep listening, hoping he’ll say something useful about the monster– about where he really came from. About whether or not the undead can ever really die.

The ghost was a man of letters. He was a man of the theatre and of his times. He set the vampire hunters after the monster and he gave them all the tools of the late 19th century to hunt him– most of all he gave them the power to write him down. Their accounts became a manuscript, and as one scholar observed, Dracula is, in some sense, the story of generating a text. The Gothic and Epistolary genres, the Novel itself were vectors for transmitting a creature from the realm of orality into our collective literary bloodstream and has never left. The ghost’s text has never been out of print.

Without oral story there is no vampire. There is no Dracula. And therefore no Dracula. The Gothic genre was a way in for the demons and spirits of the ancient world to haunt our most mimetic form of storytelling: the novel. Dracula, not the 14th century warlord or his descendants who carried the name “Dragon’s son” (Dracula) but the archaic monster of Stoker’s text comes from a time when story necessarily meant a human voice. He lives in those ruins dreaming of a time when he can join the modern age– he prepares himself by learning English, though it is not his native tongue. He learns the tedious details of English law and custom, he speculates where his campaign to gain entrance to the literary capital of the world must begin and how he will get there. In many ways the vampire must change his shape into the shape of a novel: and what are those?

A novel has scope. It can hold more information and go on longer than oral story.

A novel can contain more characters and more voices than oral story.

A novel will deal with sundry details that are often left out of oral story– and yet in a novel these details are not irrelevant. 

And so Dracula has greater scope than the common folk story– the winter’s fireside story of a suicide or the seventh son of the seventh son or a red-headed man who, after death, rises from the grave and preys on the living until the townsfolk exhume him to find the glow of life on his skin and blood running down his chin. They drive a stake through his heart, put garlic or wild roses in his mouth, and cut off his head. Afterward, they are troubled by the vampire no more. Stoker extends this tale. He alters the folk tale as only typographic technology can. The vampire of Stoker’s novel is aided by modern disbelief in the monsters of orality, and ultimately that vampiric monster is hunted down by modern technology, not the least of which is the manuscript itself.

Of course all these musings are the culmination of a long list of texts I’m reading on this subject, most notably The Technology of the Novel by Tony E. Jackson. They are also a result of many years of reading Dracula. I have probably read it more than any other book and it still offers me something new each time. As I gather materials and prepare to write my Prospectus next week I am comforted by the idea I can’t unravel the mystery of the vampire no matter how many nights I spend in his presence. His crypt will never yield up all the secrets it holds no matter how many grave-robbing critics and scholars try to lay it bare. What I write I write with no expectation of note or validation beyond the acquisition of my intended degree, but of the above ideas I can only quote and agree with Vampire Hunter Jonathan Harker:

We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.

The doors we pass through and the roads we travel.

A girl from my circle of friends during high school was murdered by her boyfriend last year and this week he was found guilty of second degree murder. I wonder what choices she made that brought her there to that house. That room. And to her last moments. We all make choices that send us in one direction or another. Longer life. Shorter life. Sometimes it’s as simple as choosing to cross the street at the wrong time. Sometimes it’s loving the wrong person.

It has me thinking about what all of us do as we go forward in life. This weird journey. People from my high school (now in our late 20s and early 30s) went to war, as I did. Some went to jail. Some are dead. Some have families, and some have alimony or child support payments. Friends have lost children; I don’t know how they go on. We all moved through the same thresholds in the same space at the same time and went out into the world…and spread across the globe as we have been we’ve all had experiences and made choices that amount to who and what we are.

And in the Army it was the same. I have friends who are still in it, or who went to work for one government agency or another after they got out, or who left and went on to pursue other lives. A lot of us talked during deployments about what we’d do when we got home. Some of us did those things. Others came home and had babies, and others got divorced or remarried. It was another threshold. We were all together in our time and place, and then we scattered.

How many times does it happen? Probably quite a bit. In high school, in college, maybe in the Service, or at a job sometimes.It happens a lot if you’re a Theatre person; shows are like that. You have those brief, intense experiences of a few months/years together with a group of people and you form bonds,share your lives and then…poof. The common way becomes many ways and each of us shoots off on a new trajectory. I’m trying to decide what it means that others I have known so well shared my road and I theirs but that all roads in this life, ultimately, diverge from one another.

Do we ever come back together? Is the splintering and fracturing and wandering away just an illusion? In the end, when life winds down, do we cross through that last door and find all our old friends are with us again?

I hope so. There are so many people I miss.

Reading: How Much, How Often, and For How Long?

My wife and I were talking about how much we’ve read this year. I think neither of us was satisfied with how little time we’ve had to dedicate to it. I write that with a niggling suspicion that if the Netflix and Xbox and the Internet weren’t available we’d have probably managed to burn through a few more books than we have. It’s not that I feel guilty, really, as much as I think the distracting ephemera doesn’t really enrich the inner world much.

How much “free” time do we waste on things that profit us nothing, teach us very little of lasting meaning or value, and end up being simply time killers? I fear we waste rather more time than the generations before us. All the convenience of our modern moment hasn’t led to an intellectual Golden Age– particularly not in the Humanities. Consider: The Ancient Greeks were able to accomplish a great deal because they had classes of servants and slaves doing the menial tasks of life so they could dedicate themselves to higher pursuits like philosophy, art, mathematics, and the perfection of the body (and they also made time for personal leisure, which they considered to be vitally important to a good life). We have replaced slavery with machinery, and yet what are our higher pursuits? This isn’t so much a cultural critique as a personal one. Maybe I should read more…

Newest Short Story (an Excerpt)

Man Hunt

I don’t know how they found out about me. It was 1985 and I’d been at Shaleville about eight years of a life sentence for murder. Nobody I heard of ever managed escape, though a man could’ve walked off the farm any time with only a little ingenuity. The State took a page right out of the Russkie book for keeping captives: ship your undesirables someplace so remote and so god-awful that even a desperate man with nothing to lose would think twice before walking out into the sticks.  For us it was a Southern Siberia: it amounted to the biggest, the most snake and gator-infested piece of swampland in God’s Creation. Even if you could push those many miles to the cracked and pot-holed highway without getting killed by the damned swamp, no inmate runs faster than a lawman’s radio.

Before we go any further: Yes, I did what I was accused of and convicted for. I deserved to go to prison and it wasn’t all that bad for me. Three meals a day and a bed are a damn sight better than anybody has a right to expect just for waking up in the morning. I’d lived in worse conditions. Nobody bothered me and I didn’t bother anyone. In fact, a week before I got called into the warden’s office I was working outside the perimeter of the farm clearing brush and the guard I was with said he had to take a leak. There were four of us on that detail and when the man shuffled off into the bushes everybody picked up his head; if you wanted to leave Shaleville early there was no better moment. Each man eyed the other, looking for that wild thought that said run. Nobody ran. I put my head down and went back to work. Days went by. Nights. The routine of prison life is like the surf slapping the sand out where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf– in and out over and over for days and weeks and months and what started as a big rock ends up nothing but so much silt.

Then somebody ran.  He was gone one the morning when they were getting a count. And they tapped me to help find him. Someone had heard (but not from me) that I had been in the jungle before. That I had been in war. That I would know how to find a man out there in that place. It was all true, but I don’t know how anybody knew it. I talked about myself to no one. The Warden, the plump and pink Mr. John Beauchamp himself called me up to his fancy office, looked me over from his big dark plush chair and said, “Trustee, you’re gonna help us and if you find him I can make it worth your while. Find something nicer for you than working the fields in that heat…”

“Well sir,” I said, “I don’t know what I can do to help.”

“It has come to my attention that you’re a tracker, that you was in Vi-et-nam, Inmate Cassady.” he said, carving out the name of that country into three syllables. “Normally I’d have Officer Ballatine tracking, but he’s got a busted leg. Damn fool got hurt trying to bring down some record hog in Georgia with his idiot cousins. My other men are fair in the woods, but I want to see about you. After what I’ve heard I suppose you could say I’m curious. If you show me something maybe we can make your time here a little easier. So how about it, son? Are you a hunter of men?”

I shook my head, “Sir, I—“

He cut me off with a gesture.

“I want you to go out and report to Officer Connelly. Now, son, I’ve said all I’m going to say. Go to it.”

I left the office without a word. How did the Warden know? What was this about? I quietly cussed my way down to the classroom where the guards were gathering.

2

They brought the dogs up from the kennels and were already fanning out by about 8am. They attached me to a team of three guards—Davis, Porter, and Connelly. Davis was young. A new guard. He was eager, and I’d never heard of him being too hard on a man. I took him for a vet, probably Afghanistan. Something about the way he walked said he was a soldier.  Porter was a drunk who had only hung on to his job as a guard because his daddy was a paid up member of the good ol’ boys club. He was belligerent and dangerous when he was sober, but doubly so if he was even half-lit. He had a bad reputation among prisoners and I knew he was going to be a problem. Connelly was from New Orleans. He was an older man, probably retired from some Police Department or Sheriff’s office somewhere (I suspected New Orleans) and now working his second job out of boredom, habit, and the bizarre domestic estrangement to a wife he hadn’t seen since he made patrol decades ago.  I’d never seen him rattled—he had the clear, calm, eyes of an old NCO who had seen the whole world roll through the grime of a dirty patrol car window. We also had a dog handler I didn’t know, a civilian in his mid-fifties wearing a white t-shirt with overalls who looked like he could handle himself. He answered to Boonie. Then there was the dog. A big bloodhound named Maxine. I usually like dogs, but this one gave me the chills. She was a man hunter, and however sweet she seemed as we walked into the woods, I knew every inmate had something to fear from her.

It was Connelly I was told to report to and so I did. Porter sneered as I told Connelly of the Warden’s orders. His teeth were nearly black with dip. He spat and said, “What the fuck are you going to do helpful, inmate, except try to fuckin’ escape? That’d be real nice. Then I can shoot you along with that nigger boy that run off.”

Connelly scowled and said, “Porter, go get extra batteries for our radios. Now.” Porter stalked off.

“You stay close and do as you’re told and I’ll keep Porter on a leash,” said Connelly evenly.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Jesus, that guy’s an asshole,” Davis said quietly.

3

 I didn’t know the boy who ran personally. I say boy because that’s exactly what he was. A stupid, desperate boy who had no idea what might be waiting for him out in the jungle. I think he was from New Orleans and had killed a man over something that was really next to nothing. He was maybe nineteen, black, and tall. I think he was known to be dangerous with a knife, quick-tempered, and smart. I had never seen him with my own eyes.

            There were four boat patrols out along the major bayous and canals, but we were going to see if we could find a passable way on foot and find a trail. We walked into the tree-line at least four hours behind the boy who had run. The first thing I wanted was a stick. For snakes, mostly, and testing the depth of mud, and for checking for gators ahead of me if we had to wade through that black, hot swamp water. The boy had picked the worst possible damned time to run through this swamp: we were in the middle of a heat wave, even by the standards of a Deep South summertime. It was ten hundred hours when we went into the trees and already a hundred and two degrees with one hundred percent humidity. It was the kind of humidity that drenches you the instant you come in contact with it just as if you’d stepped into a hot, claustrophobic shower. Admittedly, that was uncomfortable, but the problem with that kind of heat is it makes reptiles very, very active. They get hyper-alert and sometimes aggressive. The gators and cottonmouths in this area were said to be more aggressive than most. I wondered if we’d find the boy alive. Or at all.

I’d kept in pretty good shape through work in the fields, and by running. In my Army days they taught us how to keep sharp and in shape even if we were taken prisoner. Of course, my instructors were preparing us for NVA prison camps, so an American prison, even one with a reputation like Shaleville, was fairly cushy by comparison. The training had served me well inside. Porter, on the other hand, was already wheezing just a few dozen yards into the trees. He barked at me as he saw me reaching down for a snake stick.

“Don’t touch it, Cassady,” he said. His flabby face flattened itself into an angry red series of creases. He racked a round in his shotgun. I stood very still. I saw Davis tense, but Connelly just watched.

“Sir. For snakes, sir.”

“You’re scared of snakes?” He got in my face. Close. Close enough that I could smell last night’s gin on his breath. I didn’t answer. I’d been yelled at by genuine badasses in my time—Porter’s impression of a badass wasn’t compelling.

“No weapons for you, Inmate,” he said finally.

We walked on.

The ground got softer, and then we came to a few big waterways topped with thick algae greener than any grass with thick, dark trails running through them made by who knew what and had to go around. That slowed us. We saw no sign. Time passed. The dog hadn’t caught a scent and the air was still in the late morning. For a while during that walk it felt a bit like being back in ‘Nam. A lot of guys came back scarred on the inside from what they’d seen and had to do, but I hadn’t hated the war. If I’m honest, I’d enjoyed it much of the time. It’s hard to explain to folks who haven’t been and there’s no need to explain it to those who have. As near as I can say it is this: If ever you’re in a unit like I was in, and a war like that…you are, provided you abide by certain life-and-death rules, a force and a law unto yourself. If you wanted something it was there for the taking. If you so chose you could go where you wished, create what missions you might, kill when you wished almost with impunity, fuck when it suited you and made no answer to anyone about it. There was freedom like few people can imagine. I’ll admit that freedom was much abused at times. I’ll admit that too many drugs and too much killing and too much bad leadership led to the great darkness that swallowed the name of Vietnam. Don’t doubt, though, that such freedom was a heady dram. Tough to come back to the States and stand in line, pay your car insurance, and ask if you may please fill out an application to work for Joe Snuffy sweeping floors at the local Bowl-O-Rama. It was like being a tiger in one place, then to step off a plane and being expected to sit indoors and lap cream like someone’s fucking house cat. It just don’t go. For some of us, anyhow. We were meat-eaters when we came back. I damn sure was.

            About noon we ran across footprints in the mud. Davis was on the radio giving our location immediately. I approved. This far out in the sticks it was good to let people know where you were. Often.

It was a footprint, not a shoe print. The boy had taken off his shoes evidently, or, more likely his shoes had come off, sucked under the mud in some ill-advised push through a seemingly dry-looking piece of ground behind us somewhere. Someplace we had cut around or missed. Maxine bayed loud and then she was on the scent. We moved fast across a clearing cut for the power lines and maintained as a firebreak and then  hurried through trees for a few minutes to a man-dug concrete canal that went north and south. This canal was small, maybe fifteen or twenty feet across and not often frequented. That made it dangerous. Mowers came through them every once in a while to trim back the chicken trees and saw grass about ten or fifteen feet from the slick, green, moss-eaten edges of the crumbling stone, but that was dangerous too. Sometimes a gator would climb up and wait in the saw grass near the water. If a critter or a man it thought it could take wandered by it would suddenly break from the high grass and those big jaws would snap shut with the force of a falling truck and into the water they’d go together. That kind of attack was the kind you couldn’t do much against, before, during, or after. The boy, the stupid city kid, had decided to walk north along the canal so he wouldn’t have to fight the saw grass anymore in his bare feet, which by now were cut up bleeding. We were maybe an hour behind him and closing fast.

 Porter was nearly purple and complaining bitterly. His sweat smelled of cheap booze and that sour milk smell of a fat man who doesn’t wash enough. In ‘Nam I knew guys in other units like Porter. They didn’t make it to SOG, generally, and they damn sure didn’t last in SOG. Then again, few did. That unit had a 100% casualty rate. Sooner or later it landed on everybody. Good men died along with the shit birds. It fell on the just and the unjust alike. The memory made me shiver.

Maybe Porter caught me glancing back at him, and maybe he just needed an excuse to stop walking, but he moved up on me fast and caught me between the shoulder blades with the butt of his twelve gauge. I went sprawling forward but tucked quickly enough to roll up.

“What the fuck did you say, inmate?” Porter said, advancing. Davis got between us. Connelly whirled and pushed Porter back, got in his face, “Knock that shit off, Porter!” he screamed in full-on Drill Sergeant mode, “You get it together right now, unfuck yourself, and you don’t lay a hand on anybody without my say-so or I’ll have you up on charges so fast it’ll make your head spin!”

“Fuck you, Connelly! That inmate threatened me. I heard it.”

“The only thing I want to threaten you with is a shower, Porter. You stink like ass,” I said flatly. I was pissed, and my back was throbbing. I was smart enough not to fight him right there, but he’d just made my short list.

“Inmate Cassady, shut the fuck up and get on the ground,” said Davis quietly and calmly, covering me with his weapon. He didn’t rack a round, and he was only ten feet away, but I think he knew I wasn’t really a threat. Still, it was bad practice. I assumed the position, belly down, hands on my head.

Connelly and Porter stepped away and talked quietly for a moment, then they came back. Porter had this nauseating hangdog look.

“You fellas go on. I’m going to call a patrol boat in on this canal and ride up with them. Maybe we’ll get lucky and that nigger’s so dumb he didn’t cut back into the brush.”

No one objected. Truthfully we’d move faster without him. It was one less guard for me to be concerned about. It was good leaving him behind.

My Office Fantasy

I dream of the perfect office to write in. I imagine it this way:

I can get up in the morning and drive there, or even walk if it’s a nice morning. It’s right here in Monterey. It’s on a second or third story and looks out over the Monterey Bay. My dream office has big windows that let lots of light in. There’s a simple wooden desk with a few drawers– nothing fancy. Nothing that says “Corporate Raider” or “Important writer.” More utilitarian. Simple. Old. Maybe a little beat up. The chair should be comfy. I fancy hardwood floors. And a cat. Yes, I’m allergic to them and I hate to change litter boxes but, dammit, my dream office has a big orange cat that roams the entire building at his leisure. There are many bookshelves in the office, which should be big. Not the whole third story big, but maybe a quarter of it. there will need to be room for a napping couch, and a spot for a closet to keep spare blankets, a coat, an umbrella, a hat, a scarf. I’d write on my laptop in the morning and walk down into Monterey in the afternoon for lunch with my wife. Then I could come back up and finish whatever I was working on that day and send it off to an editor, an agent, an old friend who asked for this or that…

Admittedly, this office isn’t altogether necessary. When I was in the Army I shared a rickety table in a 50 man tent with my buddy in the next bunk and was as prolific as I’ve ever been. I’m not of that Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own school that says a professional writer needs xyz material components to make literary art. Writers will always find ways to write and folks do it in a million different ways (as it should be). Hell, you don’t even need a notebook. Nabokov wrote everything on index cards. I’m pretty sure most of the great Modern poets have written at least one famous poem on a cocktail napkin. Still, it’s pleasant to dream of a place where I can go and put on the writer hat and be the writer in his office with the door closed. Will it ever happen? I have my doubts. Nevertheless, I keep dreaming of my office and the full time working writer life.

 

 

 

Tolkien

I had other things to read. I was planning on whittling down my “to read” list. As in,  all those things I’ve never read before. Things people are waiting on me to read so we can discuss them, in some cases. According to Goodreads that list is in the hundreds. But then I glanced (just glanced, mind you) at my copy of Lord of the Rings and it was all over. Over the course of days I’m hundreds of pages in with no end in sight and my interest has not flagged. I’ve neglected Netflix, the Xbox, my family and friends, even biological imperatives like eating and sleeping. I’ve read this trilogy probably four times in my life, but it doesn’t matter: I’m still surprised by every bend in the road, by the vividness of every blade of grass in Middle Earth.

Tolkien is damned brilliant. First of all, his command of language, both in poetry and prose, is prodigious. He manages to evoke fascinating, important characters without giving them any of that imperviousness that so often accompanies the Hero in contemporary fantasy. Obviously Tolkien’s interest in ancient Saxon and Medieval legends/poetry is a major source, but he manages to make these characters so relevant despite the great gulfs of time and culture between those works and our modern world– the characters positively leap off the page! And, I admit, Peter Jackson’s films have colored some of my ideas of what the characters look and sound like, but nevertheless the books are so much more detailed, so much deeper and richer. That’s no mean feat, considering Jackson’s deep and abiding obsession with re-creating Middle Earth. I’m nearly finished with The Fellowship of the Ring and then it will be on to The Two Towers…

So, my “To Read” list will have to wait until I’ve walked with Frodo to the cracks of Mount Doom, until the Enemy is defeated by the most unlikely of creatures, and until all is well under the hill. So be it. The road goes ever on and on…

Fresh Start

This is a new blog about my adventures in the world of books. I feel I ought to have insightful, pithy things to say like that affable radio personality in “Northern Exposure” did at the end of nearly every episode, but at the moment I haven’t got anything like that to share. I’m battling a rather horrendous cold just now. I’ll try to be pithy at least once every other post. That seems like a reasonable goal, but I promise nothing. Pith off.

I have had ambitions to do research and work on my Master’s thesis this summer but very little has yet materialized. This must change. My thesis is on Dracula and the conflict/symbiosis set up in that novel between oral storytelling and the technology of writing. I am gathering sources and really must plant myself in a chair and do research as soon as I stop coughing. Dracula is probably my favorite book. I’ve read it every October since I was 12 years old and every time I do I see something in it I haven’t seen before. I think it is one of the most brilliantly constructed.novels ever written. This made it a great candidate for a thesis paper since I am so intimately familiar with it. I am also relying heavily on Tony E. Jackson’s The Technology of the Novel. Fascinating book on the way writing as a technology shapes the stories we tell and the way we think about them.

I also write fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I have been published in a few literary magazines and self published two books of poetry and one of short fiction (They’re available on Amazon if you were dying to read them). I am working on a novel (passively, at the moment, until the thesis is written) and I’m almost constantly writing poetry.

So, more to follow. I will try to be a faithful updater, though I tend to do these things in fits and spurts. I may use this blog as a bulletin board for research and information pertaining to my thesis and whatever else I’m writing. We’ll see.