Kevin Brockmeier
Kevin Brockmeier
Kevin John Brockmeier is an American writer of fantasy and literary fiction. His short stories have been printed in numerous publications and he has published two collections of stories, two children's novels, and two fantasy novels. Brockmeier, who was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, is a graduate of Parkview Arts and Science Magnet High Schooland Southwest Missouri State University. He taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received his MFA in 1997, and lives in Little Rock...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth6 December 1972
CountryUnited States of America
Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.
I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.
You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground.
Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.
You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.
...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.
I was wholly invested in my friendships. I might have tested them sometimes, but only to reassure myself that they were permanent. A mistake, of course.
I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page.