Stephen emerson poet biography
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Stephen Emerson (author)
American writer of fiction
Stephen Emerson (born 1950 in Sylva, North Carolina), is an American writer of fiction and other prose.
Life and work
[edit]Emerson wrote his early stories while at Duke University, where he met Robert Creeley, worked with novelist Reynolds Price, and wrote a directed thesis on Samuel Beckett. He then moved west and worked with novelists Wright Morris and Kay Boyle at San Francisco State University.
During the 1970s Emerson met several more of the writers he admired, forming influential friendships with Fielding Dawson and Edward Dorn, as well as Tom Raworth, Bill Berkson, Lucia Berlin, and Ted Pearson. A portion of his early novel The Wife appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry No. 37 (1978). His critical writings on Gilbert Sorrentino and Paul Bowles appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Additional work has appeared in Credences, Periodics, Zyzzyva,[1]Rolling Stock, Hambone
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'I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t want to read her': Stephen Emerson on Lucia Berlin
‘Birds ate all the stockros and larkspur seeds inom planted . . . sitting tillsammans all in a row like at a cafeteria.' ’
Letter to me, May 21, 1995
Lucia Berlin was as close a friend as I've ever had. She was also one of the most signal writers I've ever encountered.
The latter fact fryst vatten what inom want to write about here. Her extraordinary life – its color, its afflictions, and the heroism she showed especially in the kamp against a brutal drinking habit.
Lucia's writing has got snap. When I think of it, I sometimes imagine a master drummer in motion behind a large trap set, striking ambidextrously at an array of snares, tom-toms, and ride cymbals while working pedals with both feet.
It isn't that the work is percussive, it's that there's so much going on.
The prose claws its way off the page. It has vitality. It reveals.
An odd little electric car
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Stephen Emerson was born in San Diego, California into a U.S. Navy family; his father was a career naval aviator and his mother a former Navy nurse. Steve and his siblings grew up on various Navy bases during the Vietnam War. His father served two combat tours in Vietnam flying both the A-4 Skyhawk and the A-7 Corsair II and participated in Operation Rolling Thunder while flying off the U.S.S. Midway in 1965 with Attack Squadron 22.
Steve worked as intelligence analyst covering political-military affairs in Africa and the Middle East before embarking on an academic career. He served as Security Studies Chair at the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies and previously as an associate professor of National Security Decision-making at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Steve has written widely on subjects from American national security affairs and political instability to terrorism, African conflicts, and counter-insurgency. Chief among