Before his fall from grace, Saint James Harris Wood wrote for alternative music magazines and played music professionally. While on the road with his Gothic blues band, he deliberately employed the most dissolute musicians that Hollywood offered, who introduced him to the practice of heroin smoking, leading to his present ignoble digs in a California penal colony. He has reinvented himself as a writer whose fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Sun, Adbusters, The Shop, Descant, Iowa Review, Esquire.com, Boulevard, Chapman, Rosebud, and several dozen other fairly reputable literary magazines in a half dozen countries, and won The Iowa Review’s Tim Ginnis Prize in 2011. In 2009 March Street Press published “Note Found in the Desert—the 50 lost poems of Saint James Harris Wood.” He has three sons: Lowell, Dylan, and Zachery, who are gentlemen and geniuses. Mr. Wood corresponds with anyone! St. James Harris Wood T30027, P.O. Box 8101/CMC East, San Luis Obispo, CA 93409. His writings and music are at darklyabsurd.com.
Saint James Harris Wood
Articles by Saint James Harris Wood
Wednesday August 12
Freedom is Complicated
“Upon realizing that I alone will have to figure out how to survive, I throw myself onto the mercy of social security and state welfare.”
Monday August 6
The Swallow War
“This singular edifice sits in the center of the prison; it’s open air and we call it the plaza. There are a couple of trees, some sickly grass, and a 100 yard circular sidewalk in the plaza connecting our four yards.”