2008 Woodie Awards
Vote Absentee
The geography of despondency
Jessica Fischoff - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 11/2/05 Section: Arts
Douglas Trevor bears the comely face of a grown-up boy next door. His easy disposition and friendly attentiveness during interviews express an air of familiarity, as if you had exchanged countless casual conversations or shared dozens of genial punch lines.
Despite his plucky nature, grief's ebony lump has formed his professional center for the majority of the past six years. The UI associate professor of English has channeled the emotion's gravity into his first collection of short fiction, The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, which earned the Ivy League-educated doctorate of English the Iowa Short Fiction Award, an annual distinction delivered by the University of Iowa Press.
In 1999, Trevor's sister died unexpectedly from an aneurysm. His loss showed him the binary nature of human frailty - we suffer both physically and emotionally.
He began to explore in his writing the depth of personal desolation. His examination of such deeply rooted mental anguish grew into the leitmotiv linking together the nine short stories that compose The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, from which he will read at 7 p.m. today at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. John Simmons Short Fiction Award recipient Anthony Varallo will also read.
While a number of his stories center on bereavement, Trevor ventured beyond his initial concept of death-laden scripts to meditate on the effects of other causes of despondency. Expanding upon this depressive theme, his stories examine the loss of hope, rationality, and sobriety and relate through his characters' ability to find strength in their afflictions. His works are self-reflections from characters desperate to move on.
"I write characters that think too much," he said. "They are highly analytical."
The character-driven author began sketching his pieces' personalities years ago, before his life underwent dramatic emotional transformation.
"I had written a couple of drafts, dating back to 1997. But in 2000, after my sister died, I started putting a collection of stories together," he said. It would seem fitting that his first creative collection conveys such a theme, for the focus in his first academic book covered the presence of scholarly melancholy in literature. But his fiction stabs deeper into the guts of emotion, laying human vulnerability on a cold slab.
Trevor, though widely known for his academic texts, plans to continue writing fiction. One story published first in The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, "Girls I know," stands as a chapter in a working novel Trevor hopes to release next fall.
The author acknowledged he has only begun to traverse the map of human emotion.
"I am very interested in the transformative experiences that writers gravitate towards," he said.
E-mail DI reporter Jessica Fischoff at:
jessica-fischoff@uiowa.edu
Despite his plucky nature, grief's ebony lump has formed his professional center for the majority of the past six years. The UI associate professor of English has channeled the emotion's gravity into his first collection of short fiction, The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, which earned the Ivy League-educated doctorate of English the Iowa Short Fiction Award, an annual distinction delivered by the University of Iowa Press.
In 1999, Trevor's sister died unexpectedly from an aneurysm. His loss showed him the binary nature of human frailty - we suffer both physically and emotionally.
He began to explore in his writing the depth of personal desolation. His examination of such deeply rooted mental anguish grew into the leitmotiv linking together the nine short stories that compose The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, from which he will read at 7 p.m. today at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. John Simmons Short Fiction Award recipient Anthony Varallo will also read.
While a number of his stories center on bereavement, Trevor ventured beyond his initial concept of death-laden scripts to meditate on the effects of other causes of despondency. Expanding upon this depressive theme, his stories examine the loss of hope, rationality, and sobriety and relate through his characters' ability to find strength in their afflictions. His works are self-reflections from characters desperate to move on.
"I write characters that think too much," he said. "They are highly analytical."
The character-driven author began sketching his pieces' personalities years ago, before his life underwent dramatic emotional transformation.
"I had written a couple of drafts, dating back to 1997. But in 2000, after my sister died, I started putting a collection of stories together," he said. It would seem fitting that his first creative collection conveys such a theme, for the focus in his first academic book covered the presence of scholarly melancholy in literature. But his fiction stabs deeper into the guts of emotion, laying human vulnerability on a cold slab.
Trevor, though widely known for his academic texts, plans to continue writing fiction. One story published first in The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, "Girls I know," stands as a chapter in a working novel Trevor hopes to release next fall.
The author acknowledged he has only begun to traverse the map of human emotion.
"I am very interested in the transformative experiences that writers gravitate towards," he said.
E-mail DI reporter Jessica Fischoff at:
jessica-fischoff@uiowa.edu
