William Owen

About Me

It is never about me. Oh, this is about me? You're sure? Ok. For a long time I was happy to play the straight man despite not being in on the joke. Or at least that was what living in a small town felt like. Playing MtG was a cultural experience. Being a college dude didn't help the nagging impression there wasn't even really a joke at all, practicing kata and sitting seiza didn't solve the problem, then Bill Hicks and Kurt Vonnegut started to sort me out and I got altruistic, and that was good. Saving the world makes you feel like a superhero, and the girls and the boys are all very sweet people for the most part, what with the cuddle puddles. I earned an MFA from Goddard. Now I live in the Jerz, I write with the Postcard Fiction Collaborative, and I'm running my first triathlon this July.

Why do you write?

Writing is a terrific excuse to sit still. A professor once told me he wrote poetry because it allowed him to perfect doing nothing, and I've always admired that, the willingness to remove oneself from the moment and let the mind "strike an eddy and whirl ; marked by a curdy spume" as W.C.W. put it.

I remember most of my dreams, and thankfully they are often about gigantic war turles and gelatinuous seas, and as a writer do ply the craft as an Oneirovore, but mostly it is watching people and coffee that fuels my work.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Authors - William Carlos Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Leslie Marmon Silko, George Oppen, Heather McHugh, Keri Hulme, Jeanette Winterson, Jonathon Skinner, Rebecca Brown, Roberto Bolano, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Charles Portis, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Bill Hicks, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Rilke, Tolkien, Eliot, Martin McDonagh, Aaron Sorkin, David Foster Wallace

Books - Promethea, Cats Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, The Passion, Legends of the Fall, Wonder Boys, The Sandman, The Invisibles, True Grit, The Name of the Wind, LOTR, The Hobbit, Transmetropolitan, Ceremony, Fight Club, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, To Kill a Mockingbird, Iduna, Political Cactus Poems, The Music of Chance, Consider the Lobster