I was born in Niagara Falls, New York, sometime after the Second World War.
I was almost immediately hijacked to Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up and still live. More precisely, I grew up in Raleigh,
a verdant carbuncle on the side of Memphis, a suburb, most assuredly a suburb.
I began writing way back in the dim regions of Weir, called the teenage years,
bad poetry and no prose. Somewhere in my twenties, after reading Raymond Carver,
I decided I could also write short stories. So I wrote bad poetry and bad prose
for years, but, slowly, like a bird wearing down a mountain with its beak, I began to teach myself this solitary occupation.
Stubborn as the will of kings, I listened to few teachers, preferring to go my own merry way, even if wrong, even if embarrassing. Then, in mid-life, I developed a strange malady called either Agoraphobia or Panic
Syndrome or Social Anxiety Disease, depending on which nabob you were talking to. Suddenly—as
if hit by lunatic lightning—I was cut off from the workaday world. Into therapy I went, and, if it didn’t cure
my dis-ease, it opened me up in ways I had not foreseen. In the past five years I’ve written more and better than in
the previous 25. In a very real sense, my words go out into humankind for me.
I have worked in the book business my entire adult life, if I have had an adult
life. I began a wage slave at Waldenbooks, who, at the time, was the bully on the block, though I did not know this. I didn't
even know the block, having never been around it. In 1988, the same year I became that holy thing, a father, I began
working at Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. My wife and
I bought it in 2000. We struggle. Small businesses do and small bookstores do, hellishly.
Aside from my two published novels and my many chapbooks—chapbooks which
seem to appear on my lawn like mushrooms—I have many Works in Progress, including a finished novel (Following Richard Brautigan) and short story collection (Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories) which reside with my agent,
who is attempting to place them with an appropriate publisher. I also have a
nearly completed novel entitled The Ballad of
the Two Tom Mores. I seem to be hemorrhaging words. Publishers take note: I am creating the literature of the future.
Don't you wanna sign me to a longterm deal, one that involves pecuniary comforts and signing bonuses like Grizzlies tickets
and stripper-grams?
I can be found at: resolemcrey@yahoo.com
And my bookstore at: www.burkesbooks.com.
