In both his fiction and nonfiction, David McGlynn’s great theme is youth: its pains, confusions, and glories, its energy and idealism, its awakening to the possibilities of sex and work, tragedy and betrayal, and its potential for extraordinary goodness. McGlynn is an elegant craftsman of language. His phrases, gestures, and images stay with you for days and even years after reading. He writes about pain and error, but also the old-fashioned virtues of endurance, kindness, and labor. His writing is generous, honest, and polished. Among a generation of young male novelists and memoirists whose prose is often marked by self-congratulatory flights of self-consciousness, David McGlynn stands apart. Call him the anti-Eggers. He has a long career ahead of him, and he has both the heart and the skill to offer something entirely new to American literature in the decades to come. Image has published both his fiction and nonfiction, and we’ve chosen to excerpt an essay here because it’s shorter and more readable on line. But we can’t say enough to recommend his new collection of short stories, The End of the Straight and Narrow from SMU Press, from which material appeared in Image issue 54, and which will be reviewed in an upcoming Image Update.
Some of McGlynn’s work is featured in Image issue 46, issue 54, and issue 71. Read an excerpt by McGlynn here.
Biography
David McGlynn is the author of the story collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, published by Southern Methodist University Press in 2008. He was born in Ohio, raised in Texas and Southern California, and received an M.F.A. and PhD from the University of Utah. He now lives in Appleton, Wisconsin with his wife and sons and teaches at Lawrence University. He has won a Peter Taylor Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and his stories and personal essays have appeared in such publications as Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah.
Current Projects
October 2008
About the time I began working on the stories in The End of the Straight and Narrow, I also began to write personal essays. Most of the essays began as autobiographical meditations for a story, but at some point the story refused to turn into fiction. For a while I thought of the essays as isolated detours from the world of make-believe, but now that I have written almost ten of them, I have begun to understand the pervading themes and obsessions. The collection’s working title is Rough Water, which takes its name from long-distance swimming race in the open ocean. Swimming is one of my lifelong passions, and each of the essays wends its way toward water in one way or another—whether the story is about performing CPR beside a pool, or running out of drinking water in the Utah desert, or watching an obstetrician fill a vial with my wife’s amniotic fluid, praying it doesn’t contain a genetic abnormality that will doom the baby inside her. The essays are also about the act of storytelling itself, the trouble a writer gets himself into when he’s both the narrator of and character in his tale.