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Alan Stewart Carl
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Alan Stewart Carl (born September 1975), is an American author. He is known primarily for his flash fiction and literary renderings of alternate realities. Biography Alan Stewart Carl, sometimes called the Literary King of Texas (moniker origin unknown), was born and raised in Texas and educated at Trinity University. He lived in Washington, D.C. and New York City—where he worked for St. Martin’s Press, before he eventually settled down in San Antonio with his wife, Jennifer Sutton, a brilliant physician, and their two young children (the younger of whom is credited with creating the Gin Wiki). His mother, Lillian Stewart Carl, is also a well-known writer. In addition to his fiction, Stewart Carl is a prized copy writer and has served as the fiction editor for the cutting-edge journal The Splinter Generation. He was born on September 13, 1974. Much of his early material was inspired by his formative years as a young adult in New York City, though Stewart Carl insists that one of his favorite things about writing is the ability to break free from one’s own life. “Writing is the most freeing thing I do,” Stewart Carl has said. "As silly as it sounds, I get to be a lover, a killer, a mechanic, a prince (actually, I don’t think I’ve ever written about a prince, but I sure as hell could). I get to recreate the world daily. I get to squeeze this big mess of nonsense into something that contains meaning—at least to me, at least for me. And that’s not nothing. That’s not something everyone gets to do.” Writing His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, PANK, Storyglossia, Necessary Fiction, Flashquake, Monkey Bicycle, DecomP and dozens of other literary journals and reviews. He is a master of the flash- and micro-fiction genres, and taught a well-received lecture on the subject to Antioch University Los Angeles’ MFA program. Upon hearing Stewart Carl do a live reading of his own work, critically-acclaimed naturalist author Brad Kessler said “that guy knows his Egrets.” Adept at what literary badboy Steve Almond calls the “lyric register,” Stewart Carl often blends poetry with prose, as in his piece “Green-Haired Girl,” which was first published in Storyglossia: “She sang for me in colors. And when we lined the room with drugstore candles, the light froze solid around us.” “He takes his cues from Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel, sure,” said poet Eric Steineger. “But he also speaks the language of John Ashbery and Anne Sexton. His writing goes down as easily as single-malt Scotch, only you don’t realize you’ve finished the bottle and there you are, drunk on words." Stewart Carl is a leading member of the Bough House Movement, a group of disillusioned young writers (including Steineger, Andrew Killmeier, Jamey Davidsmeyer, the Canadian Kimberly Harkness, Sarah Long and Jessica Emerson) who have adapted the “Think Method” as an approach to novel writing. “Alan makes me want to be a better writer,” said Long in an interview. “He also makes me feel awful about myself in that I’ll-never-achieve-what-he-has-with-sentences kind of way. He also taught me that there’s no difference between Triple Sec and Blue Curacao aside from the color. And if you think about it, that’s a metaphor for all fiction.” Stewart Carl has faced some of the same struggles as other great artists and literary giants, but has always maintained that his compulsion to write is what gets him through. “Writing is the way we slice through the chains that hold us inside ourselves,” Stewart Carl has said. “Writing is how we, for even a moment, stop being so damn lonely.” His forthcoming novel, Divided, is an alternate reality tour de force about a world literally split in two by love. Partial Bibliography “Leap” - Hayden’s Ferry Review “Touch Me” - JMWW “My Father Believes” - Kill Author “What Our Father’s Knew” - Bullmens “The Boy of Threes” - Necessary Fiction “Green-Haired Girl” - Storyglossia “Cast Out” - PANK “The Nameless” - PANK “Whatever Happened To Sue Ellen?” - Staccato Fiction “Beautiful Beast” - Monkey Bicycle 
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