Ask the Author: Jordan M. Poss
Answered Questions (6)
Jordan M. Poss
I just marked Markos's book as to-read but I hope to do so soon. I also haven't read Popper yet, though I'm familiar with his broader arguments. I'm not enough of an expert on Plato (I'm more of an Aristotle man owing to Dante and St Thomas Aquinas) but that's the impression I've gotten from elsewhere. The Socrates of the Apology, for instance, sits rather uncomfortably with what I've encountered in Plato's later work. But that's something I hope to explore further in the future.
Jordan M. Poss
Tolkien's Middle-earth, certainly, but also the past of our own world--Rome as dramatized by Robert Graves, the Arizona of Elmore Leonard's westerns, the Civil War US of Howard Bahr and Shaara's Killer Angels, the medieval Russia of Laurus, the Iceland of the sagas, and the mythic northern European landscapes of Beowulf. And that's just for starters.
Jordan M. Poss
The first one that comes to mind is Lewis's own Great Divorce, which has the advantage of being a story and dramatizing its ideas rather than having three characters sit down and talk through them explicitly. I love both books, but where Between Heaven and Hell is good, I think The Great Divorce is great.
Jordan M. Poss
Read, read, read. Never stop reading. It is foolish to believe that you can write well without having read a lot, but lots of people fall for that trap. Read what you enjoy but challenge yourself, too, and have a group or network of friends to feed you new recommendations constantly. I've discovered some of my favorite books thanks to friends.
Jordan M. Poss
Without jinxing myself by offering too much detail, this project is much closer to home--a novella set in Georgia late in the American Civil War.
Update: That "novella" bloomed into the novel Griswoldville, which I released in September 2018. I'm currently in the last few days of drafting a novel set in sixth-century Britain, in the wild borderlands between the invading Anglo-Saxons and native British.
Update: That "novella" bloomed into the novel Griswoldville, which I released in September 2018. I'm currently in the last few days of drafting a novel set in sixth-century Britain, in the wild borderlands between the invading Anglo-Saxons and native British.
Jordan M. Poss
While studying medieval history in college I stumbled onto the Icelandic sagas, oral histories of the Viking Age. The stories are full of human drama--backbiting, feuding, and jealousy over everything from the mundane to the supernatural. In a number of the sagas, ghosts (draugr) appear, and they were so different from the ghosts I knew from childhood stories--and were so unquestioningly worked into the fabric of these otherwise gritty and down-to-earth stories--that they immediately got my attention. I was hooked. No Snakes in Iceland is directly rooted in those stories, and I recommend them to everyone I meet.
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