Before that, my main creative outlets were photography and air guitar. I didn’t really start writing until I got to college. I captained the soccer team and hung out at the Dairy Queen and tried (sometimes successfully) to date cheerleaders. I drove an orange Camaro with mag wheels, listened to a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and attended chapel three times a week to watch movies, we were told, that were actually filmed in hell. I turned into a redneck and attended a fundamentalist high school. “Later, I managed to infuse a little more normalcy into my life. One time I accidently dressed up as Hitler, but I didn’t know who he was either–I had just seen Charlie Chaplin dressed that way in a movie. I made mustaches out of black construction paper, and dressed up like the characters in the silent movies my Dad brought home from the library for me, films no one else wanted to watch, so I would watch them alone. Often I dressed up in costumes for no one’s amusement other than my own, just to look in the mirror. The rest of the time I was in my room practicing magic tricks (I was paid to do birthday parties by the time I was 14), or juggling, or ventriloquism. I’d never actually heard Elvis or the Duke, or even know who they were, so I was really impersonating the impersonators I heard on TV. I wanted to be an impersonator, or some kind of entertainer. Normal enough, but the whole time I would be playing, I would do things like talk to myself in the voice of John Wayne or Elvis Presley. Odd how? Well, I divided my time btween playing in the woods behind my house, in the creek, catching salamanders. Recommendation by Greg Leitich Smith.īrad Barkley on Brad Barkley: “I grew up in North Carolina as, I guess, a somewhat odd kid, though the great thing about being odd at that age is you have no point of reference. Cal and Eliot feel like people you know even as they face unusual, even surreal, circumstances with humor and aplomb. Do they have a future? Or will Eliot’s father and Cal’s mother (and her jouster boyfriend) tear them apart? A romantic comedy with an almost classic feel. When Cal and Eliot meet, there’s instantly chemistry–literally and figuratively. Eliot longs for the day when his father used to sell swimming pools–before he “found God,” and subsequently founded the “Jesus fat camp” for Christian kids (“What would Jesus eat?”), thereby also discovering financial success. Calliope is tired of being dragged by her mother cross-country from Renaissance Faire (don’t forget the “e”) after Renaissance Faire. Scrambled Eggs at Midnight by Brad Barkley and Heather Hepler (Dutton, 2006).

Dream factory by brad barkley