Jeff Stewart left home at seventeen, and lived between the states and cities. The lack of interest in the status quo or a stuffy corporate career left the road open, not for adventure or self-discovery, but for the motion of it. “I was happy moving and writing, working city to city and staying in a month-to-month rental, in a room that wouldn’t keep me, in a place I didn’t have to commit to.”
Stewart traveled almost two decades working odd jobs, food service, and once on an Alaskan salmon boat; anything to get the rent, to keep moving and writing. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Stewart had written volumes of short stories, poems and two novels. At 29, He wrote his thinly fictionalized autobiography, March of Time and Skin.
At 30, Stewart was discovered by an international lifestyle magazine, that paid him for his work about life across the States. He traveled and wrote freelance for the magazine between 2001 and 2006. His articles, written in his unique, raw form, changed the face of the industry’s journalism and gained Stewart a readership spanning 27 countries.
In 2008, Stewart was highly established in the world of American Literature with the release of March of Time and Skin, a brutal and beautiful breathtaking beat of truthful humor and the war-like victories of a life in constant motion.
Stewart’s Dead Birds Hot is a dystopian vortex of short stories with titles like “January” –a mirrored collage of an oppressed bartender as his dramatic girlfriend and job break down the remaining echoes of a future, “Glory” – a look at a young deviant’s sex addiction through the eyes of San Francisco’s Chinatown, “Wreckedge” – a story about a writer on the Philadelphia leg of his book tour who encounters an impaired reader with a bizarre obsession, “Retribution” –a sideways stroll through Manhattan with Sonny, a man at war with illusions he didn’t create and cannot escape, and, “Dead Birds Hot” –the story of a man who meets a hot and hard summer involving chain-gang labor, highways, dirt, sweat, and broken teeth in what is quickly being acclaimed as one of the best works of short fiction in contemporary literature today.
Currently living in California, Stewart has finished the novel Bad Jacket, about a writer falsely accused, incarcerated, and facing life in prison due to a psychotic reader. Also completed is Lolly, a much-awaited novel featuring the life and rise of a fashion company told from the eyes of a writer’s dissent into a world of business and the shine of a small company’s struggle and unheard of success. Stewart also recently completed Flotsam for Jetsam, about a man who delivers food for the Irish mafia, gets married then escapes massacre only to fall into a life of fame and strangeness. Stewart’s next release is Gutted Rose & Other Stories, being released early next year.
Lolly: From Fishing to Fashion, Reeling in and Unlikely Fashion Success
Non-Fiction, 187p, 4.8 out of 5 stars so far on Amazon
The gulls glide on the wind and land on the famous rock planted in the tides while the ocean reaches for Asia. In a pub one mile inland and north, a writer’s chance meeting with the owners of a clothing company ignites an agreement─planting the seed for a novel about the blood, work, fate, and unyielding vision that confounded the fashion industry and left it examining the path of Lolly.
March of Time and Skin author Jeff Stewart navigates us through the start, deconstruction, and rebirth of Lolly Clothing, the salvation from the bottom of survival to the methods of their success. Told in a beautifully raw, stripped-down style, Lolly: From Fishing to Fashion, Reeling in an Unlikely Fashion Success takes us through the insides of the fashion company and their people with humor, heartbreak, and prose that introduce the fashion process through the world of the writer; moving us along from the effects of guts and consequences to the cathedral of Lolly, and the power of never listening to the odds.
Excerpt:
"There’s a storm in the Bering Sea. The boat is roughly 75 feet and the swells are tossing it around like a plastic ball.The boat crashes through the center of the storm, its eye beating down upon the deck, and the crew pulls together tokeep the haul secured and the nets and ropes from being absorbed by the ocean. The captain screams into the storm fromthe wheelhouse, the crew bites down on their cigarettes and clutch their rosary beads. The storm began as a light rainbefore sunset, and now its arms and breath are dealing blows into the boat without mercy. The sea rages beneath the roar,and they ride the storm out for hours and sit in the galley. A bottle of whiskey is produced and the shots get poured,cigarettes get lit, and the cards come out of the box for a hand of seven-card. The captain has nothing past the ante,but his mind is on the ocean, their slip of fate from the storm behind them, and talking to his men about investing in a high-end contemporary women’s fashion company…"
Get it from Amazon here (or click on book image above):
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Ah but there is a danger in your becoming an entrepreneur able to buy more books in that you could find yourself too busy to read them.
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