While studying wildlife biology at the University of Georgia, my required reading consisted of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and a wide array of scientific journals. And yet I found myself more interested in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, and Dickens. Yes, even David Copperfield was more thrilling than sorting through statistical analysis of the visual spectrum of white-tailed deer. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much correlation from literature to science. Alternatively, I discovered profundity in the reverse—literature offered a complete analysis of existence.
And so, I read voraciously. I stacked my bedside table with the reading list material of my English major roommates. But it was my interest in lyrics and poetry that slowly drew me into writing. Growing up in a family of pseudo-academics, I was enmeshed in a natural reading culture. Both my parents are also musicians and instilled in me a love for music. I began playing guitar, piano, drums, and whatever instrument crept into our home.
In college, I realized that writing music was fun, but writing songs was difficult. They required words. They required audacity. They required personal revelation laid bare. In writing songs, I began to write poetry, to practice and play with meter and style. Eventually, I began playing with form and structure. I did this with guidance.
Adrienne Rich’s essays and poetry taught me to write with a confident voice and expertise. Audre Lorde displayed tenacity and style. Iris Murdoch brought humor to philosophy.
Encouraged by my now wife, a writer and poet, I began reading the poetry of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbury, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. I envied the worlds abroad that Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, and Gertrude Stein inhabited.
My wife and I decided to move to Medellin, Colombia. To travel responsibly, one must know what courses through the veins of the people and emerges from their minds via their songs, poetry, and literature. We began reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a form of scripture. And we discovered that in Latin America, there is immense pride in each country’s intellectual biproducts. We read Mexican author Octavio Paz. Literature became the highest art form, a true way of life as revealed by the Chileans: Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño. The Argentinians, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, removed the tops of our skulls and insisted we find the heavens in the mush of gray we called our brains.
At some point, the inspiration to write was more of a demand than a tingle.
In many of the Spanish language writers, I found fearless retorts to injustice, brutal descriptions of quotidian life, and perhaps expectedly, an obtuse but delicate investigation into sexuality.
I was proud of my American heritage. But Cortázar made Jack Kerouac read like a checkout line novel from Kmart. After reading Borges, Dave Eggers read like a literary replication of a sci-fi movie we’ve already seen. And I say this carefully. On the Road is an unavoidable inspiration to all who travel write, and Your Fathers, Where are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? refuses to drift from my memory.
Finally, my wife and I were able to move abroad to focus on film making, music, and writing. We landed in Barcelona in January 2020. And there, inspiration came by total immersion. We tread streets where Bolaño and Garcia Marquez lived. We looked for Quim Monzó in private Catalan cafes. We imagined Hemingway in a Pamplona train station. Little did we know, Orwell’s 1984 was about to become a strange reality.
And that’s where I found myself writing “Only Sharks and Punks.” Surrealism, realism, all the -isms seemed to ooze from the walls. And I found myself reading on a balconette and watching Barcelona shiver in fear of reality, injustice, or at the very least, the uncertainty of existence.
