Spotlight on Achievement
Edward Falco
In 2008, Ed Falco has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, a In an era when authors generally choose one genre and stick with it, a writer working actively and simultaneously in three genres is surprising. In the past year alone, he has been recognized with prizes in three genres. He has a new novel, entitled Saint John of the Five Boroughs, coming out in the fall of 2009; a new play, recently read at New York‘s Urban Stages, is being considered for a production in San Francisco next year; and he continues to publish his literary short fictions (a kind of writing that is largely indistinguishable from what others call poems or prose poems) in journals and anthologies.
For Falco, though, it‘s all writing. “I‘ve always worked in multiple genres,” he says. “In fact, I spent several years working intensively in new media, where—because new media writing is designed to be read on screen, navigated by links, and often incorporates multiple media—the very notion of genre is exploded altogether. In new media, the boundaries between poetry and prose easily disappear, as do the boundaries between writing and visual art.” Falco‘s literary short fictions have been collected in a volume from the University of Notre Dame Press, entitled In the Park of Culture. Though he refers to the work in that collection as prose, and generally thinks of the paragraph- to one- or two-page pieces as fiction, they are often published in journals as poems or prose poems. That was the case last winter, when The Southern Review published “Meditation on Loss,” a lyric exploration of the nature of time and change. He was taking a brief vacation on Jekyll Island over winter break when Jean Leiby, the editor of The Southern Review, called to tell him that “Meditation on Loss” had won The Robert Penn Warren Prize. Falco says that he was utterly confused through much of the conversation, because Leiby kept saying that he had won their annual poetry award, and he kept thinking to himself, “but I don‘t write poetry.” Playwriting is relatively new for Falco. He only started getting serious about playwriting several years ago, after developing a friendship with David Johnson, an actor and director who teaches in the Theatre Department. Since then, he has had two main stage productions at VT, and a few readings in New York, at Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Urban Stages. Currently, he’s working with Connie Grappo, artistic director of New York’s Working Theatre, on the development of his most recent play, Possum Dreams; and he‘s waiting to hear from a theatre in San Francisco, where the play is under consideration for the 09-10 theatre season. Locally, he’s collaborating with David Johnson again, and Susanna Rinehart, on a new play, titled The Center, which he hopes to develop for a production in Blacksburg. For all his interest in multiple genres and new media writing, Falco remains best known as the author of edgy short stories and literary novels. In a climate where getting even a single review for a literary novel is an accomplishment, Falco’s last novel, Wolf Point, garnered some thirty reviews, from The New York Times to the front page of The Richmond Times Dispatch. His favorite review line for Wolf Point comes from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where the reviewer advised readers to think of Falco as “William Blake with cinematic potential.” Blake is one Falco’s most loved poets. “It makes me happy,” he says, “to think that all those years I spent reading Blake are still somehow tingeing my writing and thinking.” His new novel, Saint John of the Five Boroughs, which will be out in the fall from Unbridled Books, is set largely in Manhattan, though several of the characters hail from Salem, Virginia, and pieces of the novel are set there. Falco is using his NEA Fellowship to work on his fourth collection of short stories, tentatively titled Burning Man. The title comes from one of the collection’s stories, originally published in Playboy, which takes place in the midst of the West’s annual Festival of the Burning Man. Falco’s stories have been published widely in literary journals from The Atlantic Monthly to The Virginia Quarterly Review, and collected in three books: Plato at Scratch Daniel’s and Other Stories (University of Arkansas Press, 1990), Acid (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), and Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled Books, 2005). The Notre Dame Review has called Falco “one of the most powerful short fiction writers of his generation,” and The New York Times has described his stories as containing “a little of Raymond Carver’s sensitivity to the menace of the everyday, and a lot of Andre Dubus’s sturdy empathy with his characters’ failings and regrets.” Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer, Robert Olen Butler, has called Falco’s stories “stunningly relevant and profoundly important.” Falco has new short stories coming out in upcoming issues of Five Points, The Notre Dame Review, and Prairie Schooner, as well as several anthologies, including Masters of Technique: An Anthology of Chess Fiction. Falco is Director of the English Department’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.
A Writer for Multiple Genres
Short fictions
Playwriting
Stories and novels
A fourth collection of short stories