Dear writers,
Today we’re thrilled to introduce you to Brad Tyer, the newest member of WriteByNight’s staff of consultants and coaches.
Brad is a longtime journalist and editor, as well as the author of the book Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape (Beacon Press 2013).
And maybe, just maybe, he influenced a decision made by David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest. Read on to find out how!
Brad Tyer is a veteran journalist and editor. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he’s reviewed fiction and nonfiction for the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times Book Review, and the
Village Voice Literary Supplement, among many other publications. He’s served two stints as managing editor of the Texas Observer (where he oversaw literary coverage), and one as editor in chief of the weekly Missoula (Montana) Independent. He’s been awarded a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan, a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant, and a Fishtrap writing residency. His nonfiction book Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad
Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape (Beacon Press 2013), earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was named an honor book in the Montana Book Awards. After long tenures in Texas and Montana, he recently moved to Danville, Kentucky, where his partner teaches creative writing at Centre College.
Where are you from?
I was born in Bryan, Texas, where my dad was in grad school at Texas A&M, and grew up in Houston. I’m a seventh-generation Texan, so Texas will always be where I’m from, but I spent the better part of the 2000s in Missoula, Montana, which stole my heart and added a new pole star to my emotional geography.
How did you get your start as a writer?
Working at a
bookstore, of course. Brazos Bookstore in Houston, specifically, where I finagled the opportunity to interview Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) in the stockroom before a reading in 1989. I turned that interview into a piece for a local newspaper and just kept writing.
What is the hardest part of writing for you?
Starting. Once there are words on paper, the fun work of making them sing can begin.
What is your strangest writing experience?
As a fledgling
journalist in the early ’90s in Portland, Oregon, I pitched the local alt-weekly a story about getting tattooed for its “Spring Adventure” issue. The editor bit, and I stole the idea for my new tattoo from novelist Harry Crews, who famously had “How do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death” — a line from E.E. Cummings’ poem “Buffalo Bill’s” — tattooed on his arm. As the tattoo artist was inking the line on my arm, she suddenly stopped and cursed herself, almost giving me a heart attack. She’d
misspelled Cummings’ already confusing “blueeyed” as “blueyed.” The error gave me a great hook for my story and forever marked me as a writer and editor with a typo on my arm. Years later I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (okay, I read half of it) and was surprised to find a character named Skull, whose own typo-ed tattoo read: “HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DEATH?!” I like to think Wallace may have somehow stumbled across my article — published four years before
Infinite Jest — and found himself amused enough to repurpose it as a cameo in his magnum opus. But who knows?
Justine Tal Goldberg
Owner, WriteByNight
P.S. If you know someone who might benefit from today's message, please feel free to forward this email along to them. Go on, help a writer out.
Resources:
Carve out writing time from your busy schedule
Discuss your writerly interests, needs and goals
Write better, achieve your goals
|
|
|
