Today I'm happy to welcome my friend and fellow writer Aaron Simon on the blog. (Don't let the grumpy face fool you; he's actually a very kind person. But we won't let on that we know that...)
I met Aaron through a former roommate when he first moved to Portland nearly a year ago. Aaron was a recent transplant from Nashville, but he'd also lived other places, including England, where he earned his Master's in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
An enlightening anecdote about Aaron: While in his Master's program he wrote, directed and acted in a 20-minute spoof werewolf film. The part of the werewolf was played by a friend's dog (footage of the dog playing, rolling over, panting, etc). The part of the military personnel and innocent victims were played mainly by non-native speakers of English whose dialog was incredibly difficult to follow. And if memory serves, there actually was no protagonist, only extras. I believe this was all intentional.
Which is all to say that Aaron Simon has a sense of humor that is evident in his work. Gotta love that.
And now to the interview!
What do you write?
I write bodice-rippers set in 13th century France (of course, it wasn't quite France then, but you get my drift), centered around the abbot of Cluny and a local peasant's daughter, Marguerite, who... Nah, just kiddin. I don't have a specific genre - or medium, for that matter - but I tend toward magical realism and short stories. Throwing spirit-possessed dogs into the mundane, conversations with muses, long-dead prophets trying to get through Immigration, that sort of thing.
Thematically, one of my profs called my style "utopian nihilism." Essentially: Camus, but with jokes! There's no point to life, so why not have fun with it - and make the world as good a place - as much as you can?
