It’s a great time to be half-Greek and half-Syrian! Never has my heritage been so aligned with the headlines. One country is the poster child for global economic failure, the other for geopolitical failure. Every day, I can’t wait to “read all about it!”
In truth, I don’t consider myself very ethnically conscious. But writing has been the focal point of my personal and professional life, and when I started writing fiction (seriously) almost two decades ago, my ethnic sub-conscious would not be silenced. It took no time to get ethnicity from the outside but a lifetime to get it from the inside to the outside.
Perhaps you’ll be willing to accompany me on this brief journey of the writing life, what discoveries one makes along the way, and how you learn to write what leaks from your pores, not what you shout from your mouth.
Jason Makansi is a man of many trades and a master of none. He is widely published (short stories, books, academic journals, professional journals) in diverse fields, pays the bills as an independent consultant in the electricity industry, is moving to Tucson, AZ in a few weeks, and is now slouching towards retirement, meaning he intends to slowly replace the time spent on what he has to do with time spent on what he loves to do. Recently, he completed a full length novel, The Moment Before, and is working on a new non-fiction book, working title Painting with Numbers: How to Sharpen Your Bullshit Detector in the Face of the ‘Experts’.
Join us
Sunday 28 February
Potluck begins at 6:00 p.m.
Jason begins sharing begins at 6:45
At the home of Emma Shaw and Mike Pereira
7033 Pernod Avenue
Saint Louis, MO
63139
