I have instructed my publicist to write this little bio in the first person to make it seem more intimate, and not so much as if I have a team of talented professionals crafting my image for me. (Which I totally do. Thanks, guys, as always, for your fantastic work. Did you get the fruit basket, by the way?)
I started writing as a very small kid. My first poem was about the discovery of the platypus, and it was a big hit with the other kids on the school bus. I'd get requests. Which totally warped me for life. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Well, actually, a writer/ventriloquist/oceanographer. My dreams of speaking without moving my lips have died slowly and painfully in the intervening years. But I have continued to write. (And someday I hope to photograph a giant squid in the wild.)
I spent the first half of my childhood in poor-and-dysfuntional-but-mostly-happy, rural American, bohemian isolation. Dad dropped out of the rat race to become a struggling painter. My parents divorced. Mom left to find herself (which she did, eventually), and my sister and I stayed with Dad in the drafty, slightly unfinished house he designed and built himself in the boonies of Northern Virginia. Nearest neighbor miles away. No money for furnace oil, so crank up that woodstove every frosty morning. No A.C., just two industrial-sized exhaust fans in the living room ceiling. No TV (busted, never got fixed). Clothes from thrift stores. Many an evening spent riding with my Dad in his van through the moonlit Virginia countryside, listening to 8-track mix tapes he recorded off the radio while he painted during the day. My sister sat in the passenger seat, and I sat on the cooler between them. I'd have get up sometimes when we came to a stop sign so I could refill my Dad's clay mug with ice and wine.
Some nights we'd just drive out to White's Ferry, and old barge that for $2 would give you passage across the Potomac into Maryland. We'd stop the van at the river bank and honk the horn, and we'd hear the motor kick in across the water, and watch the ferry creep out of the darkness, the coast the van aboard and ride to the other side of the river. Then we'd park the van in the woods at the edge of the water, and my Dad would get out his guitar, and we'd sing Jerry Jeff Walker songs, and "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys," and then my Dad would drink some more wine, and tell us stories, and listen to ours. Then we'd ride the ferry back across and go home.
The kids at school thought I was really weird. They were not wrong. I kept to myself, read books every free minute of the day, preferred my Dad's esoteric 8-track music -- Jerry Jeff, Tom Waits, Leo Kottke, John Prine -- to my peers' rockin' Top 40 -- Kiss, Rush, Hall & Oates, Supertramp. I had a reputation at school as a badly-dressed, eccentric smartypants -- which is to say, a nerd. But secretly I knew that I was cool. I actually had a night life, after all. I spent many an evening each week hanging out in actual bars with my Dad and his friends, who all thought I was aces. And, come on, Supertramp?
More to come later....
