Biography
Born in Mississippi in 1966. Old southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, TN. Attended college in New Orleans, LA (Tulane) but soon dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Headed west in 1990 and lived in Oregon for several years (Portland & Eugene). Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. Has lived in California since '96, primarily in Bay Area and L.A. Worked as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, WA) screenwriter and journalist. Short stories have been published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. First of the Phineas Poe novels, Kiss Me, Judas originally pub. in '99, selected as Barnes & Noble best new voice, translated into five languages. Penny Dreadful was pub. in 2001. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother, parents still living.
Author Statement
I never so much intended to write noir. Although the books and movies I gravitate toward often tend in that direction. In college, I primarily studied Shakespeare, Faulkner, James Joyce. I started writing as a kid, mostly genre-hopping science fiction. The wild west crossed with middle earth, such that a werewolf might coexist on the same plane with Billy the Kid and goblins. The stuff I write feels like an affliction. I write as
photo by: Dennis Hearne
internally as I can manage, by which I mean I try to turn the narrator's body inside out, to literally get under the skin and find the nausea, vertigo, and despair inherent in personal interactions. I have a tendency to focus on the visceral minutiae, the pain beneath the skin. One reviewer called the Phineas books "existential noir," a phrase that annoys me intellectually, but sometimes feels accurate. As I've mentioned in various interviews, I write mostly in binges. I write best when I hole up somewhere, isolate myself completely, what I call going under. I finished Kiss Me, Judas in two weeks on a writing jag in a borrowed artist's studio in East Bay that had a coffeemaker, cheap stereo, and toilet. And disturbing paintings on the walls. Penny Dreadful spilled out over the course of several months in a Motel 6, while Hell's Half Acre was written in a rented room over a bar in North Beach. To my mind, the Poe books are primarily about betrayal, guilt, redemption — the ways that people wound and fail each other. But they are also about the shifts that occur in everyday reality — you can never step in the same reality twice. I burrowed deepest into this idea in Penny Dreadful, in which the reality shifts constantly, moving from the realm of a shared consciousness in a fantasy role playing game to an internal deconstruction of Ulysses. There's a fair amount of Biblical imagery in my books, no doubt because of my Southern upbringing, which accounts for a certain hillbilly goth feel. But my books are also all about love. Whenever someone asks what my books are like, the first words out of my mouth are "scary love stories." Everyone comes from a fucked-up family, everyone was damaged by their parents, and everyone is trying to find some kind of love that makes sense — so what else is there to write about. But what most interests me are the ways that people damage each other when they are simply trying to love each other. And so when a story is coming to me, I follow my obsessions. I follow my characters, and naturally the stories that unfold in the Phineas books tend toward crime and violence, mystery and erotica. I'm just trying to get under the skin.