Featured Writer of the Month

Writer, Photographer, Artist

Stephen Mead

Our Featured Writer for the month of June…

Age?
Better ask Methuselah.  He has a better memory than I do.


Location?
New York

How long have you been writing?  
Since I was a teenager.  In my Junior and Senior years of high school, in addition to poetry, while others were trying to figure out whether they should go to college, I was working on two novels (which of course were never published!)
What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment as a writer?  
To find a peace in mind/peace in heart regarding my own obscurity.  After all, there are a great number of people writing, and I think there is a certain freedom in being “unknown”:  writing just what we want to in the best ways we know how.
What are you currently working on? 
I always seem to have several projects going on at once and since I work a day job, finding time remains a challenge.  In addition to seeing what poem may come to me once or twice a month, I have been working on a few new art/text hybrids, in addition to revising some older ones.  The older ones entail re-photographing the art while the newer ones entail seeing what lines/words come to me as I work on art.
Why do you write?  
It seems to be the only way for me to get a word in edgewise!
Tell us about your work in Crack the Spine.
“Under Covers, My Life as a Reading List”
How a love of literature can be a deep relationship with one’s self and the human spirit.
What inspired this work?  
This is part of a longer work of essay/memoir, “A Thousand Beautiful Things (A life in Two Hallways and Four Small Rooms.)  A book publisher liked what I initially sent but felt I had more to say. Hopefully this piece and others I have written since he contacted me have lived up to that.
Favorite Book?  
Ah, impossible to say.  I read about a book a week and lately have been going back to re-read books I read ten or more years ago.  It was odd to discover how little I remembered of the plots/characters and how much I was able to enjoy them all over again!
Favorite Author?  
There are too many to count, from just about every variety of genre of writing there is!
If you could have dinner with one fictional character, who would it be?  
On the fun side: Sookie Stackhouse.  A little vampire adventure could really help alleviate the boredom in my life.
What is your favorite word?  
Grace.
Anything else to say?
A quote from Marge Piercy… “The real writer is the one who really writes.  Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire.  Work is its own cure.  You have to like it better than being loved.”