About Alex

There are few things as satisfying to me as a good sentence. The best ones express a poetic defiance, exacting from our inexplicable existence something eloquent and true, spitting in the eye of inevitable death one time-resistant word at a time. 

All the literary work I have done so far has been an effort to capture, with some degree of stylistic courage, the wonder and corruption of my country, and to turn that same critical prism constantly upon myself, my musician’s ear tuned to the nuance of harmony and dissonance, to the tension within contradiction, to the historical noise that emanates from a nation’s landscapes and cityscapes.

SHADOW MY LIKENESS (novel-in-progress): Equal parts road novel and family saga, Shadow My Likeness is a Künstlerroman about generational trauma and a lineage of people who were chewed up by a culture they bought into, believed in, and fought to defend—people who would be forgotten if not for one man’s effort to remember, interpret and preserve. Told in first-person and third-person point of view, the novel is narrated/directed by James Peak III, a musician who finds himself sidelined by the breakup of his band and the sudden death of his father, events that engender a process of both personal and generational reflection and investigation. Recognizing that the only path out of his alcoholic despair is through a feat of creativity, James seeks to sift from the complicated crosscurrents of history a reassessment of his values.

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Drumming is an activity that, unlike writing, delivers me not more deeply into thought and observation, but out of it. Behind the kit, I am without words (much as I love them), the whole train of language behind me now where I sit cutting into time with the sharp axe-edge of raw experience. The blade bites nicely (on the good days) and there is nothing else. No fear or niggling ambition. No need to seek meaning. Just me and the shimmering axe-edge and the sweet spattering of woodchips. 

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Growing up, there was always a motorcycle in my father's garage. He was very contradictory that way. That is, while he was an avid rider and staunch advocate for learning the workings of a machine, he also vehemently forbid me from ever owning a motorcycle. As my father, he had the right. Motorcycles are dangerous. They demand the rider's utmost respect and attention--and even then, your life is largely in the hands of other motorists. My father said all this, forbidding me from doing something that so obviously brought him joy. He knew all along that I would disobey him. He only hoped to delay the inevitable, to instill in me that essential sense of respect and caution in hopes that by the time I did what he knew I was going to do, he would feel he'd done everything in his power to prepare me. 

Of course, that applies to more than just motorcycles. Motorcycles were the metaphor in a larger conversation about values, responsibility and spirituality. And this is precisely the conversation I yearn to further. I want to share my work. But I also want to listen, to learn, and to collaborate. 

-AM