Brett Garcia Rose

About Me

I am a software entrepreneur and writer living in NYC. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in Journalism and Creative Writing, I worked as a freelance journalist for local Boston and New York publications, as well as an investigator for various organizations in the Animal Rights and Environmental movements. After returning to study at Columbia in NYC, I founded Concept-Tel, inventing and producing software for the global telecommunications industry. It is wonderfully unstable and rewarding. I have also been a meditation teacher and martial arts instructor, and can occasionally be found playing the drums at local Irish pubs. My fiction has been published in various literary and consumer publications, including Newsday Magazine, New York Press, Rose and Thorn, Opium, Withersin, Spectrum Magazine, Susurrus, Lit Up and others. I've been nominated for the Million Writers Award and was a finalist for Opium's Bookmark Competition, but I've never won anything.

I don't mean just writing. Contests and lotteries and casinos just don't like me. But it's great to be here, and I look forward to sharing with other writers.

Why do you write?

I stopped writing for myself when I first interned as a journalist. That didn't work, so I then started an exciting and promising career as an art director and was promptly booted from the magazine publishing industry when an intern ratted me for being color-blind (she was correcting my mistakes until we stopped dating). I used to write every single day, but then I just lost it somehow, and didn't try making excuses. I started again a few years ago by reworking some old stories, to see how they might differ so many years later, and I have been steadily becoming more productive ever since, and I hope it lasts.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Some of my favorite authors are here...there are so many good writers. My taste in books run fairly generic, and I will no doubt be judged accordingly, but some of my tops, the ones I am willing to reread in a pinch, are Andrew Vachss, Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathan Franzen, Annie Dillard, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and many others I forget and am surprised to remember at random times.

And I am always eager for suggestions, as I don't spend much time in bookstores and most of my friends are semi-literate musicians.