{"id":14039,"date":"2025-01-07T09:32:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T14:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/?page_id=14039"},"modified":"2025-01-07T09:32:49","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T14:32:49","slug":"josh-russell","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/josh-russell\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Russell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019ve always enjoyed words, and I\u2019ve always enjoyed telling stories. When I was in high school and college, back in the late 1980s, I thought that meant I should be a journalist. Two events happened nearly simultaneously to send me down a different path: in January1988, when I was a sophomore at the University of Maryland, I enrolled in Beginning Fiction Writing; and a few weeks later I failed the J-school typing test. I loved my fiction workshop, loved imagining the lives of other people and translating those imagined lives into stories. Because I couldn\u2019t type 65 words a minute on a Selectric, I wasn\u2019t allowed to declare journalism as my major or to take any journalism classes. The choice was easy. Since then, I\u2019ve published three novels\u2014Yellow Jack <\/em>(W.W. Norton), My Bright Midnight <\/em>(LSU Press), and A True History <\/em>(Dzanc Books)\u2014a story collection\u2014King of the Animals <\/em>(LSU Press)\u2014and more than a hundred short stories and essays in magazines including One Story<\/em>, Epoch<\/em>, and Subtropics<\/em>. My work has earned me fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a native Illinoisan\u2014born in Carbondale, raised in Normal\u2014who\u2019s also lived in Kentucky, Maryland, Louisiana, Colorado, Tennessee, and Florida. I\u2019ve worked as a 7-Eleven clerk, a phone-order skateboard salesman, an oyster-shucker, a bouncer, a fine-art packer, a helpdesk dispatcher, and an adjunct, instructor, and professor at community colleges and universities. I now make my home in Decatur, Georgia, where I live with my wife and daughter, and I teach at Georgia State University, where I\u2019m Distinguished University Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Counting the Days<\/em> is the story of Stan, a son in his forties who after almost twenty-five years returns to his hometown after being alerted to his parents\u2019 illnesses by a call from his high school ex-girlfriend. In addition to letting him know his mom and dad are sick, his ex\u2019s call triggers nostalgia for their shared past\u2014and hints at a secret that could bring them together again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this novel, I wanted to write a story about a character I don\u2019t often see in fiction: a smart, thoughtful person whose life hasn\u2019t turned out the way he hoped it would, even though his life isn\u2019t bad, it\u2019s just not as bohemian and unique as he hoped it would be when he left town at eighteen: Stan is settled, has a job he doesn\u2019t hate teaching at a community college, an enviable mortgage rate for the loan on his one-bedroom condo, and a cat named Big Mike, but he\u2019s not a prize-winning poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I joke that I write about what\u2019s worrying me to distract myself from worrying, which is probably why another of the central elements of the book is the ways familial responsibilities evolve as we and those around us age, including the disorienting role reversal for everyone involved that occurs when parents need to be taken care of by children. Stan\u2019s dad is in the hospital, and his mother is having troubles that look a lot like the beginnings of dementia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I wanted to write a homecoming story. I\u2019ve moved a lot, both as a kid and an adult, and I find wonderful the experience of going back to a place I\u2019ve left and having to figure out if the landscape and people seem different because my memories of it are faulty or even false, or because the landscape and people have truly changed\u2014or both\u2014the kinds of figuring Stan does throughout the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Josh Russell’s novella Counting the Days<\/em> in the spring of 2027.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve always enjoyed words, and I\u2019ve always enjoyed telling stories. When I was in high school and college, back in the late 1980s, I thought that meant I should be a journalist. Two events happened nearly simultaneously to send me down a different path: in January1988, when I was a sophomore at the University of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-14039","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9DpGh-3Er","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12777,"url":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/richard-babcock\/","url_meta":{"origin":14039,"position":0},"title":"Richard Babcock","author":"Jaynie","date":"May 15, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was a first-year law student, my seatmate and I survived the terrifying boredom of our civil procedure class by trying to reconstruct the line-up of every National League baseball team of the late 1950s and early 1960s. 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