Dr. John Williams

You Ask for a Biographical Sketch?
I have no firsthand knowledge of anything before my birth and a highly selective version of everything after. My boyhood, once real, now myth, has passed into a topic of conversation among the voices in my head. I've held a number of odd jobs and practically no even ones. After getting an MA in 1978, I spent two and a half years in Europe, teaching on military bases for the University of Maryland. Weather and population density drove me home, and I started a small printing business in 1981, which redefined "stress" for me, until I sold it in 1986. In an attempt, futile as an electron in a new orbit, as it turned out, to return to my younger definition, I spent three limbo years, then joined the faculty of LaGrange College as an instructor in 1989. Feeling at home, I pursued even higher education, and delivered a wall-hanging, hardly prematurely, in 1998. This coincided with the period I got married (Erin) and had children (Martin and Ellie). Also during this period, my playwrighting partner Ken Clark and I wrote several musical plays, two of which were produced at a small theater in Columbus, or as Ken puts it, "to standing-room-only audiences throughout the Southeast." A revival of our first, now titled The Kelly's Truck-Stop Bop, is scheduled to be produced by the Lafayette Theater Company in LaGrange in February 2007. I have also played in a series of bands over the last twenty years or so, to the point of life-threatening middle-age cover-band fatigue; more creatively, I have provided percussion for Ken's songs on a series of CD's ( cdbaby.com/all/kenclark  and broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=38858 ). Writing evolved from drawing in adolescence, and since college I have written a great deal, published a little—finding far more reward in the former than in the latter. Since Lake Moon, my first novel actually set in type (Mercer UP, 2002), I have distanced myself from society with a string of manuscripts, the most recent the just-completed family saga Man Walking Backward in the Wind, which brings an entire new level of meaning to the term "man walking backward in the wind."