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.

I can be found at: resolemcrey@yahoo.com

And my bookstore at: www.burkesbooks.com.

Talk about Talk

--Your novel did well.

--If you mean by doing well that it was published.

--Yes, but it got some nice reviews.

--It did, from friends.

--What else could you want?

--Nothing, nothing. I’m not ungrateful.

--It sure had a lot of sex in it.

--

--Are you working on a sequel?

--No, not really. Except in the sense that you are now in it.

--Meaning.

--Meaning is drained of meaning. Though she feels as if she’s in a play she is anyway.

--More postmodern tricks.

--No tricks. Nothing up my dust jacket.

--More autobiographical libidinous reflection and refraction.

--I am not Jim.

--Right, and I am not the product of your self-referential imagination.

 "Talk about Talk" appeared originally in Cautionary Tale.