# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)!
I live in Spokane, Washington, among the towering ponderosa pines and Douglas firs of the Inland Northwest, above the meanderings of the Little Spokane River, and below the basalt cliffs of Five Mile Prairie. Back in my Pittsburgh days, I earned a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies, but later moved West to raise a family. After retiring from forty-one years of teaching, I now walk, think, and write, publishing short pieces on Substack, Medium, and longer works like the ones listed below.
CULTURAL, PLACE-BASED FICTION
Whiskey Rebel, Izzard Ink, 2025
Wildcat: An Appalachian Romance, Izzard Ink, 2024
Radio Free Olympia, Izzard Ink, 2023
Dream Fishing the Little Spokane, Inchitensee, 1997
POETRY
Hubcap Collection Plate, Inchitensee, 2022
# What is/are the real-life story(ies) behind your book(s)?
Whiskey Rebel arose in the not so distant past when my wife and I were driving along Washington State’s Columbia River and my wife said, “I lived around here back in high school.”
“It was a bad time, right?” I responded. “That was a long time ago. Do you remember the road?”
“Palisades Road. It’s the only road in Moses Coulee.”
“How far in did you live?” To go there meant returning to her heart of darkness.
“The last farm at the end of the road. About twenty miles in. We were hired hands and only lived there for four months.”
“Do you want to take a side trip?”
“Sure, why not.”
After we swung onto Palisades Road, I thought we were on the moon. I don’t like to describe my experiences as surreal, but Moses Coulee was one otherworldly place. In fact, this experience launched me into Whiskey Rebel, the book where the speaker Punxie Tawney says about Moses Coulee. Here’s what he says:
“To my left, the basalt wall of the Columbia Gorge steeply dropped down to the coulee floor. Then to my right, the basalt wall abruptly rose again. I imagined a sign stretching across the entrance to Moses Coulee: ‘PEARLY GATES.’ No, not a chance. ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE.’ Again, I didn’t think so. This place didn’t care that much.”
And so it is, the wellspring from where my longform, place-based fiction is born.
# What inspires/inspired your creativity?
Creativity is all about awareness, openness, rejecting the static, encouraging the dynamic. To promote awareness, I walk among trees every day (weather permitting), listen to all that is said around me, and pay attention to where my mind goes when I’m not writing, especially in the shower. My writing sessions are always less than two hours, and then I clean, cook, walk the dog — anything but write, because the writing process continues in my head but in a different way. A good night’s sleep brings new perspective.
Additionally, I read widely. Currently, I start the day rereading Rick Rubin’s philosophical The Creative Act and reading for the first time Katie Fallon’s nature study Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird. I go to sleep reading Alex Ross’s music history The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Notice, I’m not reading fiction. Awareness is the fuel that supplies creativity.
# How do bad reviews and negative feedback affect you and how do you deal with them?
Because we are like tuning forks, I orchestrate words and broadcast them to the world, and because this is true, Whiskey Rebel’s vibe will strike some as harmonic, some discordant. We are tuned to different frequencies; that is all. This is not to say I reject all feedback. I pay very close attention to those who are tuned to my frequency, including myself. I am a deep reviser. I try and achieve the purest tone possible. I walk away from my writing every day and come back and revise what I have written before adding something new. I sometimes come back and revise the same five to ten pages for weeks. Sometimes I return months later to revise again.
# What were the best, worst and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book(s)?
For most of my life, it’s been a challenge to find my way out of others’ styles and voices. Of course, for the longest time I wasn’t aware that I was putting new wine in old wineskins, and it took my first son’s death to provide the electroshock that caused me to toss all convention into a meat grinder and make fictional sausage. Suddenly, Carl Jung and his mom were driving up the Little Spokane River, letters were written to and by Mr. White, a mountain whitefish, and Walt Whitman sat down and had a serious conversation with Chief Spokane Gary. “Yep, Dream Fishing the Little Spokane, these are the best short pieces I’ve written,” I thought, self-published them, and haven’t looked back.
# Do you plan and/or outline your writing projects or do you “fly by the seat of your pants?”
I certainly don’t plan. I’m a place-based writer who begins with a deep sense of location and a germ of character and then starts writing … watches it sprout … sees it grow. Truth be told, I’m dyslexic. We dyslexics prefer to live in our right brains, a place of imagery, narrative memory, and associational thinking. Why? because the back left corner of our brains, a major site of language production, has an overgrowth of neurons, a place where our words get lost in the swamp. Some dyslexics want to move completely out of their left brains and live in the visual right side where life is always a movie. Other dyslexics like me harness the power of our right brains to create fun word salads. Our narratives usually have short chapters and read like movies. We love writing free verse poetry, although our free verse can be quite lyrical. We don’t mind misspellings and malaprops because these “mistakes” often suggest new ideas worth pursuing. All this is to say, I am a natural born storyteller who has developed over time control of my words. I’m in my late sixties and still enjoy adding new contexts, word meanings (especially different meanings for the same word), and literary techniques. Puns? Can’t get enough of them.
# What are your plans for future books?
I’m working on a new book: a Radio Free Olympia (my 2023 book) for Spokane, WA. The odd-numbered chapters feature Anise Finocchia, a young woman who willfully keeps her eyes closed and feels her way through life. Her avatar is Turk (turkey vulture). The even-numbered chapters feature Patrick, the Irish saint who later is reincarnated and schooled in Buddhism and finally is reborn in Spokane. His avatar is Fly (dragonfly). Eventually, Anise’s and Patrick’s paths meet, all under the watchful presence of Mountain Whitefish. Currently, the manuscript begins:
Anise Finocchia’s mom died today.
Hellbent on survival, her mom had solicited a van, one that was stopped at the intersection of Sprague and Napa in Spokane, WA. She was putting on a show by sucking on a lollipop like a little girl. The driver liked what he saw and motioned for her to hop in. She did so, and without saying a word, they drove to an alley and parked.
# If you could start a movement, what would that be?
Movement, interesting word. Before the printing press, there were schools of this and that, and then the printing press changed the state of information exchange and allowed us to have movements. Movements are singular and transitory things, so the whole notion that a movement will create positive change is a bit of a pipe dream. That being said, wouldn’t it be nice if we understood that is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, and once we get that down, let the children come to us. Maybe we’d need less fentanyl.
# Tell us some quirky facts about yourself.
I was born in a shoebox and baptized in the River Jordan.
Links
https://jeffreydunnspokane.com
https://www.instagram.com/jeffreydunnspokane
https://www.facebook.com/jeffreydunnspokane