The Basics:
Austin born, did stuff, broke things, fixed some, and now I'm in Missoula, mt, for an mfa.
the wordy version:
I was born in Austin, Texas, and lived there off and on most of my life. (57 years, now, and counting. Cautiously.) I got lucky for a good long while, playing drums in some kickass bar bands, and getting more slack than I deserved from the world. I eventually blew it, though. After a long streak of fucking up with stupidity, alcohol, and drugs, I ended up homeless in my own damn town. [Insert "It's a long story" here] Once I got sober and grew up a bit, I managed a GED in 2011, then a creative writing degree from Austin Community College. (I bow forever to Charlotte Gullick and the entire ACC CRW department.) UT Austin came next, for a BA in English with an honors creative writing minor, and now I'm up north in Missoula, Montana, with Angie, my roomie, and Babadook the cat, working on an MFA in fiction. I'm also the Online Managing Editor for CutBank, UM's MFA program lit journal. Go figure.
I've also been crazy lucky to have essays, poetry, fiction, and memoir published in venues including The Mud Season Review, Pithead Chapel, UT’s Hothouse Review and Liberator Magazine, Austin Community College's Rio Review, Split Lip Magazine, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine (and print anthology!), and the Open Bar @ Tin House. More important than any of those cool things is that I was able to put together Street Lit and the Street Lit Authors Club, which provides books and creative writing workshops to Austin’s homeless community. (www.streetlit.org) I'm working with University of Montana and the Poverello Center (Missoula's homeless shelter) to get a Street Lit workshop cooking up here. I'm pretty excited about that. |
Street Lit & the Street Lit Authors Club
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So, there's reading, writing, studying (or not), and quite a bit of frittering around to avoid all of it. Street Lit is what I do, though. It's a passion project that ties this life to that. In short, we collect books and deliver them to the ARCH (Austin's homeless shelter), and hold a creative writing workshop there every Saturday.
Since my move to Missoula, the group is in the wise hands of Tony Nuñez and Phil Force. We could use your support, morally and otherwise. Details and awesomeness are freely available at: www.streetlit.org. Drop me a note on my contact page and I'll put you in touch with Tony and Phil. A little more about ourselves...
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Me, trying to be a decent human.
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a self portrait on a bad day
The scan to your left is a self portrait I sketched while homeless, an extended event that stretched off and on from 2007 to 2012.
At the time of the illustrated window-peeping paranoia, I was holed up illegally in a vacant apartment. (You can read more about the experience in Split Lip Magazine.) That guy in the window is one of the selves I refer to, and please note, I don't mean to imply I am an us, as in diagnosable, but the homeless experience etched a distinct before-and-after line in my life that affects nearly everything I write, think, and do. I'm not who I was before those years. Yet here I am.
(No, I'm not tripping, but...) I see us, you and me, as a multiplicity of selves, an overlapping succession of incarnations in the here and now, who sometimes find ourselves helpless as newborns in the mind-bending spaces between discrete lifetimes. Somehow, all of these states are tied to the same mind... I spend a lot of words trying to work out my confusion over identities, refamiliarize myself with who I've been, and to accept that, yes, that guy--someone I never dreamed I could be--was me. And so was this one, and the other one, and the one speaking now.
And sometimes it's fun to just tell a damn story.
I've been studying fiction mostly in classes, but tend toward the essay and memoir. I often find it helps to write about myself as if I were a fiction, a third-person character to observe and comprehend, a character who, once I have him on the page, can transform into the I of a personal essay. The writing often becomes a means of self discovery, a pathway to discern what I think and feel, and to explore what others might think and feel, as well. It helps make sense of things, or take note of what is nonsense and always will be.
At the time of the illustrated window-peeping paranoia, I was holed up illegally in a vacant apartment. (You can read more about the experience in Split Lip Magazine.) That guy in the window is one of the selves I refer to, and please note, I don't mean to imply I am an us, as in diagnosable, but the homeless experience etched a distinct before-and-after line in my life that affects nearly everything I write, think, and do. I'm not who I was before those years. Yet here I am.
(No, I'm not tripping, but...) I see us, you and me, as a multiplicity of selves, an overlapping succession of incarnations in the here and now, who sometimes find ourselves helpless as newborns in the mind-bending spaces between discrete lifetimes. Somehow, all of these states are tied to the same mind... I spend a lot of words trying to work out my confusion over identities, refamiliarize myself with who I've been, and to accept that, yes, that guy--someone I never dreamed I could be--was me. And so was this one, and the other one, and the one speaking now.
And sometimes it's fun to just tell a damn story.
I've been studying fiction mostly in classes, but tend toward the essay and memoir. I often find it helps to write about myself as if I were a fiction, a third-person character to observe and comprehend, a character who, once I have him on the page, can transform into the I of a personal essay. The writing often becomes a means of self discovery, a pathway to discern what I think and feel, and to explore what others might think and feel, as well. It helps make sense of things, or take note of what is nonsense and always will be.
