Philip Graham
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Arts |
| Occupation | writer/professor of creative writing |
| Location | Urbana, Illinois, United States |
| Introduction | Ya can't give me too much life! I've worked as a cab driver in NYC, a Santa Claus at Saks Fifth Avenue, been a bartender, a carpenter's and upholsterer's apprentice, crewed on a staysail schooner, hitchhiked around the U.S. and Japan, lived in small African villages, canoed on the Yukon River, did volunteer work near Ground Zero, travelled through Europe and lived in Lisbon, Portugal for a year. I love my family life as a husband and father, I scratch away at my writing every day, and I'll happily cook up a stew, a vegetable risotto, or polenta laced with garlic--all you have to do is ask. |
| Favorite movies | The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Waking Life, Dersu Uzala, Matrix (only the first one), Amélie, Get Shorty, Hoodwinked, Pleasantville, Stranger Than Fiction, Koyannisquatsi, Lisbon Story, Fantastic Planet, Finding Neverland, Princess Mononoke, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Commitments, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Brave Little Toaster, Map of the Human Heart, The Way Things Go . . . |
| Favorite music | The Byrds, Mário Laginha, The Roots, Johan Hedin, Henry Purcell, Teofilo Chantre, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, Toumani Diabate, Brian Eno, Bach, Virginia Rodrigues, Rádio Macau, Buika, Steve Reich, John Fahey, Procol Harum, Hildegard von Bingen, Oumou Sangare, Marisa Monte, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Shostakovich (the string quartets), Madredeus, Benjamin Britten, Tinariwen, and the list goes on and on . . . |
| Favorite books | Zillions of 'em. A small slice of a sample, in no particular order, books by Fernando Pessoa, Ismail Kadare, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anna Kavan, Mia Couto, Elsa Morante, Miguel Torga, Chinua Achebe, José Saramago, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lady Murasaki, James Baldwin, Leo Tolstoy, Chaucer, Henry Green, Grace Paley, Yann Martel, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson, and this list goes even farther on and on . . . |