Who are you?
Name’s Jeffrey Dunn, and I live in Spokane, WA. I’m an author type, dream fisher, and history miner. Currently, I’m writing cultural fiction to some critical acclaim as well as cultural commentary, although I’ve scribbled all along, beginning as a nature child, and then evolving into a radio dj and station music director, an academic with a Ph.D. in English Literature and Cultural Studies, and an award-winning English instructor retired from 41-years in the classroom.
What do you write?
I bring magic to reality. Beginning with a seed of an idea plucked from a walk in the woods or from eclectic reading, I then plant the seed on the page and return over and over as it flourishes. In Wildcat: An Historical Romance, a photograph of a long-gone Appalachian hotel whispered in my ear a tale of rebirth. In Radio Free Olympia, the idea of a pirate radio transmitter broadcast an entire magical garden.
Started? I was born with an active interior life and resented the intrusion of school, bolting on the third day of kindergarten out the door for home. When my grade nine English teacher read us Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar and then asked us to write something in response, I wrote a story about a man in jail cell talking to an emperor penguin. My teacher said he liked my story. He then read it to class, setting me free.
Avoid? anything that is prosaic and rhetorical. Where’s the whimsy? The mojo?
I love creating the same way I love air, water, plants, animals, earth, my wife, and my son.
Where do you write?
Today, I’m sitting on a couch with a laptop. In front, a large picture window looks out on Siberian peashrubs, Ponderosa pines, and Douglas firs. To my right, another picture window frames a piney wood. To my left, the kitchen. Behind, prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, and Hebuterne as well as a beloved original piece of seeing eye birches by McKenna Kornowski of Wenatchee, WA. All very delightful, but not essential
When do you write?
One morning, I write about 300 words, and then the next morning, I revise those words before adding more. On day three, I’m back at revising the first 300 before moving on. This will continue for a week to ten days until I’m 10+ pages in and fairly satisfied with the first 300 words. Nothing stops me from returning to pages and adding, deleting, or revising as more pages unfold. Ten years after finishing Radio Free Olympia, I went back and deleted 50 of the first 100 pages and added 50 new.
Why do you write?
Why? Silly question. Creating is like breathing, eating, and sleeping. It just so happens that writing is the sort of creating I do most, although I’ve urban homesteaded and created mountains of literacy curriculum. I come from a long line of creators. Back to Ireland, my Dunns were blacksmiths. The McKees, Greggs, and Butterworths (North Brits) were ministers, which is to say readers and storytellers.
How do you overcome writer's block?
Awareness of all that is not me. I walk among trees every day (weather permitting), listen to all that is said around me, and pay attention to where my mind goes when I’m not writing, especially in the shower. My writing sessions are always less than two hours, and then I clean, cook, walk the dog — anything but write, because the writing process continues in my head but in a different way. A good night’s sleep brings new perspective. I also read widely, often the biographies of interesting artists and musicians. I’m fascinated by other’s artistic process. Watch this video of Picasso painting. He was no one trick pony.
Bonus: What do you enjoy doing when not writing?
Listen to music. I crave the vibratory alchemy that music creates inside, and, for me, listening is the primary sense. Matter is alive with the vibration that is the stuff of universal unity. Narrative, a genetic legacy, is a carrier current that binds our humanity. Oral narrative is vibratory, but writing is a pharmakon (Derrida from Plato), on the one hand a medicine, giving permanence to narrative, but on the other hand a poison—in the translation from sound to visual—losing the vibration of narrative. My son, a musician, is a master of vibration and in practice and performance testifies to universal unity. If Emerson said he was a transparent eyeball, I am a timbral tympanum.
My thanks to Jeffrey Dunn for today's interview.