View current page
...more recent posts
My friend and former college roommate Mark Mellon has been getting quite a few stories published lately. He took fiction writing courses at the University of Virginia with John Casey (An American Romance, Spartina), although he's never been particularly interested in writing Casey's brand of mainstream "literary" fiction. Mark writes stories that could be characterized as "intellectual pulp fiction," torquing up the raw material of war stories or science fiction with his own unique mix of anger, violence, and erudition. I'm posting his bio, to give an idea what he's up to, but also to give the "lay of the land" for an emerging writer at the turn of the millennium.
"Mark Mellon is a novelist who supports his family by working as an attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. His life has been checkered, with past experience as a mover, lifeguard/swimming instructor, door-to-door salesman, carpenter's helper, Russian translator, soldier, phone solicitor, collections counselor, and teacher. He has had the following short stories published: 'Harry's Car,' in issue no. 1 of Retard magazine; 'Trophy of the Hunt' in issue no. 32 of Aberrations science fiction magazine; 'Conversations With an Old Man' in issue 2, vol. 2 of Chasm magazine; 'The List of Caliban Cade' in the Jan. 1999 issue of Gothic.Net, an Internet e-zine; 'Where Will We Bury Them All?,' in the July 1999 issue of the e-zine Of Ages Past (this last story will appear in 2001 in an anthology, Twilight Antiquity, put out by Dark Star Publications); and 'The Old Man and the Sea Ate Me' and 'Partisans,' in issues 3 and 6, respectively, of Gauntlet! The Magazine of Heroic Tales. Three other stories have been accepted for magazine publication: 'That Summer on the Moon" (by Albedo One, an Irish science fiction magazine), 'Viva La BigAss' (by Terra Incognita), and 'The Brave Little Cockroach' (by Anthrolations, the Magazine of Anthropomorphic Dramatic Fiction). Mark has also written two novels, The Empire of the Green, and Hammer and Skull (respectively a science fiction novel and a novel about World War II) and a fantasy novella: Escape From Byzantium."
The image below is an 18 x 18 inch piece of mine called Aggregating, 2001. The spherical elements are drawn with MSPaint and Paintbrush and printed on an EPSON 2000P on archival matte paper; the flat areas of color are also printed on the EPSON. The paper is cut into fragments, rearranged and patched together with strips of linen tape (on the back). The whole thing, slightly rumpled and bowed, hangs with pushpins on the wall. This piece will be on view in the Momenta Art benefit exhibition, 72 Berry St, Brooklyn, from April 1 - 22, and will be reinstalled at White Columns and raffled off on April 24. (And assuming your computer will stretch it to fill an entire screen--as opposed to just tiling it--the jpeg makes dandy desktop wallpaper!)
