Omnivoracious has posted my profile of first novelist Ayize Jama-Everett, whose The Liminal People is out from Small Beer Press. It's a great book, and the author was a great interview subject (unless the jerk in the post directly below this one.) Go check it out!Later, in college, he would hone his talent for dialogue by taking screenwriting classes, while a job at a comic book store after college gave him new insight into the possibilities of graphic novels. “God Bless Comic Relief in Berkeley California. It was the first place that introduced me to a higher level of graphic novels. Somewhere I still have a copy of William S. Burrrough’s Tornado Alley illustrated by S.Clay Wilson. I read Paul Aster’s City of Glass graphic novel illustrated by Dave Mazzucchelli, and Watchmen. I drooled over early Paul Pope work at the same time I discovered an amazing old series called Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. I saw the medium as a vehicle and not a genre and knew that what I wanted to write would always be influenced by the literary culture I grew up in. So I stopped trying to find an artist to draw my scripts and started writing stories that I loved.”
