Steve Erickson

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Steve Erickson bigraphy, stories - Novelist, essayist, film critic

Steve Erickson : biography

April 20, 1950 –

Stephen Michael Erickson (born April 20, 1950), pen name Steve Erickson, is an American novelist, essayist and critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Award in Literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation., and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop movement.

Biography

Steve Erickson was born and brought up as an only child in Los Angeles. For many years his mother, a former actress, ran a small theatre in L.A; his father (died in 1990) was a photographer. When he was a child he stuttered badly. Because of his stuttering some teachers believed that he could not read. This motif occasionally has recurred in his novels, such as Amnesiascope.

Erickson studied film at UCLA (BA, 1972), then journalism (M.A. 1973). For a few years he worked as a freelance writer for alternative weekly newspapers. His first novel, Days Between Stations, was published in 1985.

Since 1985 Erickson has published nine novels and two non-fiction books, Leap Year and American Nomad. Erickson himself appears briefly as a fictional character in Michael Ventura’s 1996 novel, The Death of Frank Sinatra.

Erickson has written on a variety of topics in periodicals including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and Rolling Stone among others. Currently he is a teacher with the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is the editor of the national literary magazine Black Clock. He has written about film for Los Angeles magazine since 2001 and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award in criticism.

Erickson’s work has been admired and cited by other authors including Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem and Mark Z. Danielewski. In describing his influences, he states:When I think of writers who have had an impact on me, I come up with people that never get named [by my reviewers]. Faulkner, Henry Miller, the Brontës, Stendahl, Paul Bowles, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler. I would have to include in that group Márquez, who is one writer that has been cited, and you’ve probably got to include in that group Pynchon, simply because Pynchon is a little like Joyce. His influence is so pervasive these days that you can’t help but be influenced by him.Mx Lane, James. BOMB Magazine Summer, 1987. Retrieved May 17, 2013. Erickson’s novel Tours of the Black Clock appears on critic Larry McCaffery’s list of the 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction; and in a winter 2008 poll by the National Book Critics Circle of 800 novelists and writers, Erickson’s Zeroville was named one of the five favorite novels of the previous year. In March 2011, Variety announced that actor-director James Franco had acquired feature rights to Zeroville.

He lives with his family in Topanga Canyon, in Southern California.

Recurring motifs

Erickson’s novels revolve around concepts that appear in many of his works. One of them is slavery, both actual and metaphorical. Arc d’X begins with the story of the love affair between Thomas Jefferson and a slave girl, Sally Hemings. In a number of Erickson’s novels the selling, buying, owning and disowning of women appears; as often, the men are the more profoundly trapped by what they seek or purport to possess. In virtually all of his novels, the female protagonist is the catalytic figure who sets events into motion, particularly in The Sea Came in at Midnight and Our Ecstatic Days where female characters are dominant. Another important theme in Erickson’s novels, particularly in Our Ecstatic Days, is parenthood and the loss of a child. Our Ecstatic Days follows a mother’s search for her missing son over the course of a quarter century. The Occupant from The Sea Came in at Midnight is left by his wife and child. In Days Between Stations Adolphe and Maurice Sarre are abandoned by their mother, and Lauren’s son Jules dies. The profound estrangement from his father of Zeroville’s central character, Vikar, leads to his obsession with movies, and later he becomes a paternal figure to the teenage Zazi after her mother dies. In These Dreams of You, the adoptive parents of the four-year-old Ethiopian orphan Sheba set out to find the girl’s birth mother.