VP Profile #1: Sean Craven
May. 21st, 2010 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cathschaffstumpHappy to finally get the first of these finished! Presenting my fellow VP XIII'er and the maker of the famed chili dog casserole:
“I’m a compulsively creative person. I make music and pictures, I’m the kind of cook that friends and family casually refer to as the best in the world (there are untold millions of us…), I’ve even dabbled in sculpture and film when I was a kid. And whenever I’ve seen or heard or tasted anything that I’ve loved or admired I’ve wished that I’d created it myself.”
Sean Craven has a case of the jitters. Sometimes when you watch him, he jitters out of focus. Because he oscillates, there are moments when he is sharp against the background, so sharp you almost forget about the background. I met Sean at a week-long writer’s workshop where I watched him weave around and through reality. I wish I could do that.
This excerpt is from an essay that Sean wrote in 2007. When I talk to Sean, I can see the truth of this in him. Many of us creators have been saved by our art.
“Art has given me strength and comfort and refuge. It has challenged me and angered me and changed the way that I looked at myself and at the world around me. It has shown me the crystalline beauty of purely rational thought and the deeply knotted torment of madness and it has allowed me to accept and value these things in myself.”
Sean’s story Tourists introduced me to Sean’s writing. It is a unique blend of horror and humor, a little bit of an emotional roller coaster. What makes “Tourists” work for me isn’t only that juxtaposition, but it’s also the realism of the story. Sean is a master of inserting the odd into the common.
Mirrored from Writer Tamago.