Welcome our new faculty member David Keaton for 2015-2016

Jefferson Dela Cruz

The English Department welcomes our new faculty member for 2015-16: Academic Year Adjunct Lecturer David Keaton. Forrest Nyugen (English, ‘16) interviews him below.

I received my BFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University and my MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where I worked closely with Chuck Kinder on finishing my first massive, unpublishable novel. But now that this is out of my system, I’ve since placed fifty or so pieces of fiction and nonfiction in various publications, as well as published two novels and two collections of short stories. My first collection, Fish Bites Cop! Stories to Bash Authorities, was named the 2013 Short Story Collection of the Year by This Is Horror and was a finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award, and my first novel, The Last Projector (Broken River Books) was recently released in a more portable paperback edition. I’m currently working on a fiction project that deals with the current police abuses in our country and the attempts to rectify this with new technology such as body cameras.

Why SCU?
I have been very impressed with the information I continue to discover regarding SCU’s incredible faculty and campus. I’m also fascinated by SCU’s long history (the longest in California, right?), as well as their wonderful stable of writers.

What do you do in your spare time?
Lately, I've relegated most of my spare time to some last-minute writing projects. There have been a couple short-story invites for upcoming anthologies that I hope to finish up this week before I put this computer in a box and chase it to California. I'm also an avid movie watcher, and for no good reason, I collect games for the long-defunct Atari Lynx "handheld" (I put that in scare quotes because it's notoriously unwieldy). Useless trivia - Tobey Maguire was the little kid in the original Atari Lynx television commercial. His is the only success story I could find regarding this game system.

If space aliens from an evil galactic empire we only recently discovered — but too late! — declared war on kingdom animalia, phylum chordata, class mammalia, the entire world and also America, by raining down disrespect in the form of nukes, lasers and/or name-calling on the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, and President Trump failed us again, and the oceans are still rising, and the bees are still dying, and we regretted ever cutting NASA's budget, and if, after a series of completely logical events, our very own Santa Clara University became the last bastion of capitalism, not to mention Jesuit Distinctness, for all humankind amid an onslaught of epithets and shrapnel to safeguard everything we few, we patriotic, we mammalians hold dearest: hair, breasts and hot-bloodedness. Could we count on you? You say that, but what would you do?

I contemplate post-apocalyptic scenarios almost daily, and they almost always involve the hoarding of eyeglasses. I have five pairs of glasses to avoid any Lord of the Flies-type power struggles, so I would be in charge of using my pile of glasses all day, every day to focus the sun and heat up our dinners. This would put me in a fearsome position, kind of like the bad guy in Keven Costner's The Postman, which means I would use my authority to force people to watch The Postman, or, more likely, to please hold these glasses for a second because my arm is tired and heating up this stone soup is taking forever.

Answer all the questions in the speed round with only an adverb:
Shakespeare? Bloodily
The Oxford Comma? Correctly
Yoga? Bear-ily
Plaid on plaid? Loudly
Coke or Pepsi? Toothlessly
People who just can’t hang? Clint Eastwood-ly
The Shrinking American Middle-Class? Tragically
The Patriarchy? Leave It To Beaver-ly
The current state of literature in English? Timidly
Air-conditioning? Desperately
Speed round? Cautiously

Aug 3, 2015