Steve Adams joined the Writers’ League in December of last year and lives in Austin.
Scribe: In what genre(s) do you write?
Steve Adams: Right now I’m focused on literary fiction, memoir, and essays. I’ve also written plays and even a couple of musicals.
Scribe: What authors would you like to have coffee or a beer with and which beverage?
SA: Alcohol, but with this group I think I’d need a bartender to handle the range of demands. Norman Mailer (just read his amazing biography by J. Michael Lennon), Joan Didion, Patti Smith, Tennessee Williams.
Scribe: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what book would you want to have with you to keep you sane?
SA: Tough question. I don’t think any one book would keep me sane, but I’d try to pick one that would at least keep me busy for a good long time trying to ponder it. Such as The Bible, or Joyce’s Ulysses. One Thousand and One Nights might fill some time too.
Scribe: What have you learned from your association with the Writers League?
SA: I just joined.
Scribe: Where do you see your writing taking you (or you taking it) in the future?
SA: Well it’s already taken me to NYC, LA, and now back to Austin. Honestly, it’s so much a part of my life, it’s hard to answer the question. I’m already “here.”
Scribe: Is there anything else about you that you would like to share with the world?
SA: An opportunity for blatant self-promotion!
I’m a local writing coach. It’s work I love because I’m fascinated by the writing process, and I’ve that found people who have stories they need to tell are always interesting. I just had one of my best years, creatively, in my life, having a half dozen creative nonfiction pieces published after stumbling across the form by accident. Then one of them won a Pushcart Prize, which has been a fantasy of mine since I was an undergrad.
Steve Adams’s creative nonfiction was included in the 2014 Pushcart Prize XXXVIII anthology and has been published in Willow Springs, The Pinch, and elsewhere. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, anthologized, and published in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Chicago Review, Georgetown Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He’s won Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and The Bronx Writers’ Center “Chapter One” Contest, been a guest artist at The University of Texas and a scholar at the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, and his plays have been produced in New York City and across the country. He was recently awarded a Jentel Artist Residency, and he is a writing coach in Austin at www.steveadamswriting.com.
A podcast interview at Postmasters Podcast where I discuss the writing process, writing coaching, and winning a Pushcart Prize.
http://writingpostmasters.com/2013/10/01/04-place-persistence-the-pushcart-a-dialogue-with-author-writing-coach-steve-adams/
