David Gordon

David Gordon was born in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, publishing, and pornography. His first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU/Cabell First Novel Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Purple, and Fence among other publications.

Gordon's latest novel is Mystery Girl.

From the author's Q & A with Michael Hafford for Interview:

HAFFORD: Someone told me the other day that if your character needs to have a different job or have something changed about him, to just do it and worry about going back and fixing it later.

GORDON: That's the miracle of word processing. Think about when every one of those changes meant retyping. I agree. The problem then, though, is that I literally forget and sometimes I have characters whose names change three or four times in the course of the story. Remember, too, that there's a time factor. If you're drafting novels, you maybe haven't gone back and looked at chapter two in months. So, suddenly you're re-reading this thing and you're like, "Mary, Marcy, Marlene, Magdalene," and you're like, "Wait a second." Another thing I do is write notes to myself and tape them to the wall right in front of my face. I actually have some pictures somewhere of the Mystery Girl wall, because I was moving. Basically the whole wall of my room is this weird collage art project of scraps of paper and charts of things that bit by bit I kept adding. And theoretically I would go back and change those things. That's another thing you can...[read on]

Visit David Gordon's blog.

Gordon's first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU/Cabell First Novel Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award.

The Page 69 Test: The Serialist.

Writers Read: David Gordon.

The Page 69 Test: Mystery Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue