Phillip Gardner

Basics:

I was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina and grew up about five miles away, near the Saulston crossroads. I attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where, with the help and support of some fine teachers, I began writing fiction. For a couple of years after college, I almost made a living as a musician, touring the southeast playing Top-40 music before teaching composition and literature classes at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve taught English at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina for longer than I can remember and along the way taught at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee.

Publications:

My two collections of stories, Somebody Wants Somebody Dead and Someone To Crawl Back To (Boson Books/Bitingduck Press) are available on Amazon. I'm a three-time South Carolina Fiction Project Winner, and my work has appeared in more than forty journals and magazines with national/international circulation.

Style:

Eclectic, ranging from stark, dark realism to absurdist humor. From the whimsical to the strange. From the poignant to the pathological, from slap your knee to slap your husband, from horror to hope.

Blurb:

“Phillip Gardner’s collection of stories pretty much corners the market when it comes to people living on the wrong side of the law—which is usually the right side of the law in these locales—and taking matters into their own hands. Throw in a garbage collecting voyeur, an obese drowning victim, a Bicycle Man, and a whole knot of ne’er-do-wells and these fantastic stories will make you think, ‘My life’s bad, but it ain’t this bad,’ which is to say that Gardner’s hit the mark in the tragi-comedy venue.” George Singleton—author of The Half-Mammals of Dixie

Interests:

Screenwriting/writing, recording, performing music. My script, Necessay Evils, is available at Boson Books (C&M Online). Four CDs of original music, The Gardners of Soule, are available at www.PhillipjGardner.com.

Highest achievement:

When I was sixteen, I was a drummer in an R&B band called The Brotherhood. We played genuine soul music: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett. We got paid for playing the music we loved. We had a regular gig at a strip club in Raleigh, NC, called The Keg. The rest of my life has been sort of downhill.