Miembroweedlit

Sobre mí

There’s a theory that what you are meant to do, your destiny in life, is what you thought you wanted to be when you were six. When I was six I wrote my first novel, a fifteen-page epic about an adventurous otter named “Ottiga.” After that, I took a bit of a hiatus.

I finished high school, went to college, roamed, and spent time adventuring in the mountains and by the sea. I worked at ski areas, fish markets, investment companies, and construction sites. I led student language and community service trips in many countries, got a master’s degree, got married, and directed college study abroad programs in Spain, Australia, and Venezuela. It wasn’t until late in my twenties that I began to write stories again, and it felt good. It felt like a way of understanding some of what I’d come through, and a way to make my own small contribution to this troubled, crazy, beautiful planet we call home.

I took a few years to get a Master in Fine Arts in Fiction & Literature from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where I had an invaluable opportunity to work closely with accomplished authors including Antonya Nelson, Andrea Barrett, Jim Shepard, Wilton Barnhardt, Tom Paine, and others. Later, I was privileged to participate in master classes with some of the giants of contemporary American literature, including Robert Stone and Russell Banks. Writing is an essential part of my daily routine now, and I don’t see that ending any time soon. I’ve been fortunate enough to see many of my stories and essays reach print, and my first novel, Will Poole’s Island, was released in August 2014 by the excellent Stephen Roxburgh at Namelos Editions, who was once Roald Dahl's editor and whose collaboration on the book was, to say the least, both a great honor and an education unto itself. There are several more book projects in the pipeline.

In my “day job” as a featured expert for National Geographic Expeditions and as an independent educational program director, I travel a lot. In fact, I’ve been lucky enough to have a professional career that has allowed me to work in more than twenty-five countries and every continent except Antarctica. All this globe trotting has given me some material to draw upon, although the most important material has undoubtedly come from simply being alive, a human, at this particular moment in the history of our species.

My stories take place within specific physical landscapes: cities and small towns, mountains and oceans, raw nature in all its power and beauty and emptiness. Writing can be a form of prayer, a way of expressing gratitude for the incredible richness of our world. As American writer Wendell Berry wrote: “To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.”

Writing and reading are two of the best ways we have to connect with fellow humans, too. In this I find myself very much in agreement with the great James Baldwin: “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I love thinking and talking about writing, storytelling, travel, and any other topic that offers a fresh or unexpected perspective on the universe and our place within it, so if you have any thoughts or questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and I will do my best to respond without too much delay.

Ubicación

Vermont and Nantucket

Página principal

http://www.timweed.net

También en

Twitter

Conexiones de miembros

Amigos

mdflynwriter, ThomasWhaley