David Griffith

David Griffith is a writer to watch—politically engaged and bitingly funny, but never shrill. His passion for social justice is grounded in his engagement with art and religion—two lenses of vision that, rightly understood, sharpen our awareness of irony and ambiguity rather than stifling them. His essay collection A Good War is Hard to Find meditates on the photos of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and the culture that made them possible. The pieces are poignant, sad, comic, witty; his prose sleek, intelligent, and deeply humane. This is no dry, theoretical tract. The pieces bounce from personal narrative to heavy intellection and back again, as Griffith considers a welter of cultural influences, from Susan Sontag to Star Trek, Aquinas to Esquire. But as the title hints, the dominant influence is Flannery O’Connor’s notion of transformative violence. Griffith’s combination of talents and interests is rare indeed: he is working the same territory as Thomas Merton in books like Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and Seeds of Destruction. In short, this is cultural criticism with a soul.

Read David Griffith's Prime Directive in Issue 47 here.

Current Projects

My next book is a series of personal essays concerning the divide between poverty and privilege, as well as the variegated space between those two ends of the spectrum. Much of the book draws upon my experiences growing up in, living in, and spending time in midwestern cities that used to be thriving industrial centers and now are economically depressed, and the impulses that have attracted me to and lead me away from these cities. The occasion for the book—the impetus for the whole project—was the murder of four homeless men three blocks from the apartment we were living in South Bend, IN. The proximity of the murders, along with many other strange occurrences, trials and tribulations, lead me to see my own revulsion and horrified fascination with the crime as indicative of the way many people, who are otherwise of good conscience, must see the lives of the indigent. The working title is You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead, which, like the title of my first book, is a rip-off of Flannery O’Connor, although this one is a little more obscure. It was the title of a short story she published in New World Writing that would become the first chapter of The Violent Bear it Away. I don’t think that the title will stick, but it has helped me to remain focused on the spiritual impoverishment that is, ironically, at the heart of great wealth and crippling poverty.

Biography

Dave Griffith is the author of the book of personal essays, A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press, 2006). Sr. Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, said of the book: “Griffith offers gripping personal testimony to the difficulties of living out the Christian imperatives of love and forgiveness amid a culture that legitimizes government violence as the only "real" way to establish social order.” Born in Fostoria, Ohio in 1975, Dave grew up in Pittsburgh, Blue Field, West Virginia, Roanoke, Virginia and Decatur, Illinois. He received his BA from the University of Notre Dame and MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College. His work has appeared in the Utne Reader, online at killingthebuddha.com and at Godspy.com, a quarterly magazine about faith and culture. During the summer, Dave is the chair of creative writing at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, a summer program for exceptional high school artists. He operates a blog at http://www.goodwar.blogspot.com.