The Writer

Portrait of the Writer

More appropriately this should be titled “about me.” My name is Thomas Buckley, and I am the eponymous writer of A Writer Reads. A reader extraordinaire, an inveterate and life-long scribbler, I received a baccalaureate in English Literature, and was accepted to do graduate work in Poetry and Criticism.

I never went.

After trying unsuccessfully to find housing near the university of my choice, I took a winter off in Denver to ski. Then I allowed myself to be wooed by the siren songs of lucre and ease, took a left-turn, and pursued a Master’s of Business Administration in Finance. I spent the next twenty-odd years as a corporate hired gun chasing numbers around the globe. Exciting, at times, and bankable, but inevitably soul-draining.

During all that time, however, I could never rid myself of the desire to write, and write I did: journals, poetry, fragments of novels. After I jumped off the corporate hamster-wheel, I had more time for literary pursuits, and in 2008 I self-published a hand-crafted collection of my poetry and photographs, Women and Other Dreams. Since then I have written (and rewritten, and rewritten, ad infinitum) a novel, An Adequate Vocabulary, that as of this writing remains unpublished.

Therefore the simple truth about me is that I am an author in need of readers (or, in this case listeners), since any creative work, as such, does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in the engaged interaction between its creator, and an audience. Even if that happens to be an audience of one.

Which is where you enter the equation…