{"id":1415,"date":"2011-03-10T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T21:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2025-02-27T10:54:27","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T18:54:27","slug":"buzz-mauro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/buzz-mauro\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 67: Buzz Mauro"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Buzz Mauro<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Buzz Mauro\u2019s stories have been published in River Styx, NOON, New Orleans Reviewz, Isotope, Tampa Review and other magazines. His poems have been published in Tar River Poetry, Fugue, Poet Lore, Main Street Rag and other magazines. He has an MFA in Acting from Catholic University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, and believes you can never have too many MFAs. He\u2019s published three books with co-author Deb Gottesman on the applications of acting technique to \u201creal life\u201d\u2014primarily public speaking and job interviews\u2014and has taught public reading skills at the Rainier Writing Workshop and The Writer\u2019s Center. He\u2019s co-founder and Co-Executive Director (also along with Deb Gottesman) of The Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts, Washington, DC\u2019s largest theatrical training center. He lives in Annapolis with his partner Steve Daigler.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cFractions\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The first fiction class I ever took was with Rick Moody, and when it came out that I was a math teacher (which I no longer am), he said I should write \u201cthe math book\u201d that the literary world had yet to see. I liked the idea, and he was Rick Moody, so I\u2019ve been writing stories with math in them ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFractions\u201d has a lot less math than some of my math stories. In this one I was more interested in the hellishness of parent-teacher conferences than the math itself. Also, less facetiously, much as some of us would like to believe we live in a \u201cpost-gay\u201d society where everyone is \u201cfine with it,\u201d plenty of people still have trouble integrating their sexuality into their lives, and that\u2019s an issue that finds its way into a lot of my fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ran sprints in high school, never more than 220 yards, and I tend to write super-short. At 4,243 words (ten Willow Springs pages), \u201cFractions\u201d is one of my longer pieces. I wrote it in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, where the geniuses David Huddle and Ann Pancake had everything to do with getting it into its present presentable form. Thanks, too, to Sam Ligon for seeing something in the story and offering his amazing eye in the crucial final stages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes on Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve read gluttonously since I was a kid, and my family, who have always thought I needed more fresh air, make a lot of fun of me for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never thought I\u2019d be in a book club, because I couldn\u2019t imagine having my reading predetermined to that extent, but I\u2019m in one now and loving it. It\u2019s a bunch of smart, interesting, nice people who have introduced me to some wonderful recent books I probably would not have gotten to without the impetus of our monthly meetings, including Gary Shteyngart\u2019s Super Sad True Love Story and Marianne Wiggins\u2019 amazing Evidence of Things Unseen. I tend to go for the classics (all-time must-not-miss: The Brothers Karamazov), but I love Richard Powers (all that science and linguistic agility and humanity) and Lorrie Moore\u2019s short stories (so funny and heartbroken). And everyone in the whole world should read J.M. Coetzee\u2019s Disgrace, because it\u2019s the best example I know of that rare and wonderful thing, a truly important contemporary novel that\u2019s an honest-to-god can\u2019t-put-it-down page-turner. Oh, and one more: Michael Chabon\u2019s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the Great American Novel. For my non-contemporary lit fix, I\u2019m currently reading the Hebrew Bible for the first time, and you really can\u2019t beat it for crazy. (Read it from the beginning and tell me I\u2019m wrong.) Some of it\u2019s beautiful, of course, and all of it\u2019s fascinating. I\u2019m taking it slowly, in conjunction with Christine Hayes\u2019 fabulous Yale undergraduate course, which\u2014by the way\u2014can be found in its entirety (videos of lectures, assignments, even exams), along with full courses on lots of other enticing subjects, at Open Yale Courses. (Yale happens to be my beloved alma mater, but the courses are free and available to anyone \u2013 and they include a great one on the American novel since 1945.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love to dip into certain books at random for a jolt of language energy to get my own writing going. The best book for that is David Foster Wallace\u2019s Infinite Jest, which I\u2019m ashamed to admit I haven\u2019t read all the way through, but which I open all the time. I find that Nicholson Baker works well for that, too, as does Lydia Davis, and my new favorite inspirer is Jane Gardam (discovered in my book club!).<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n

Fractions by Buzz Mauro<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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