Tag: “Essayist”

Over the years, Marshall Surratt has committed himself to writing about or photographing people who have sought to make a difference, including Rosa Parks, Anne Braden, Pete Seeger, Wendell Berry, and Wes Jackson. Other times he has turned attention to his family lore, to sort out past wrongs and attempts at penance, believing in self-examination, too. Articles and reviews of his have appeared in Christian Century, Christianity & Crisis, Texas Observer, and Dallas Morning News, as well as other publications.

Eckleburg: What captures your interest most in your work, now, as a reader of your work?

Marshall Surratt: In reading, I probably am most interested in how character and belief intersects the world of action. The nuanced descriptions in Defoe’s  Journal of the Plague Year of those who use difficult times for self-aggrandizement seem as relevant as ever.

Eckleburg: What are you working on now?

Marshall Surratt: I am writing a longform essay on political rhetoric, particularly as used to coalesce one’s own side and present other people as the dangerous enemy. When I taught journalism at the university, the intersection of religion and faith and the use of political rhetoric were my particular areas of study.

Eckleburg: Who and what are your artistic influences?

Marshall Surratt: My influences have been both writers and photographers, writers such as Wendell Berry and William Carlos Williams, or the writer-photographer Wright Morris, each who located his work in his community and sought to convey the quiet grace in the lives of those people in the surrounding community. I am also indebted to those people of faith who sought to empty their egos and engage with the world around them in a meaningful way, and are inquisitive and comfortable with not knowing everything, whether someone like an Owen Barfield (with whom I spent an afternoon once upon a time) or a Simone Weil.

Eckleburg thanks Marshall Surratt. Do you have new work published here at Eckleburg or elsewhere? Add your Selfie Interview and share the news with our 10,000+ reading and writing community. If you have a new book out or upcoming, join our Eckleburg Book Club and let our readers know about it.

Ann Beman is Tahoma Literary Review’s nonfiction editor and also serves as prose reviews editor for the Museum of Americana online journal. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, Mojave River Review, and some other cool places. But nowhere’s as cool to her as where she lives with two whatchamaterriers, a chihuahua, and her husband in Kernville, on the Kern River, in Kern County. Cue the banjos.

Eckleburg: What captures your interest most in your work, now, as a reader of your work?

Ann Beman: I am most interested in how I as narrator move through a space. How do I capture the motion? How do I capture the space?

Eckleburg: What are you working on now?

Ann Beman: I am in the early stages of writing a collection of essays based on seasons in the Kern River Valley — in the traditional sense and in the peculiar ways that this place and this community define seasons.

Eckleburg: Who and what are your artistic influences?

Ann Beman: I’ve been reading Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, Elizabeth Bradfield’s poetry, and Ted Williams’s Earth Almanac. I am drawn to fiction — both novels and short stories — where place is its own strongly developed character. Jane Harper’s thrillers set in the Australian Outback come to mind. Right now I’m reading a lot of Japanese fiction, but for this seasons project, I’m particularly influenced by an app called 72 Seasons: A year seen through the ancient Japanese calendar.

Eckleburg thanks Ann Beman. Do you have new work published here at Eckleburg or elsewhere? Add your Selfie Interview and share the news with our 10,000+ reading and writing community. If you have a new book out or upcoming, join our Eckleburg Book Club and let our readers know about it.