I’ve always enjoyed words, and I’ve 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’t type 65 words a minute on a Selectric, I wasn’t allowed to declare journalism as my major or to take any journalism classes. The choice was easy. Since then, I’ve published three novels—Yellow Jack (W.W. Norton), My Bright Midnight (LSU Press), and A True History (Dzanc Books)—a story collection—King of the Animals (LSU Press)—and more than a hundred short stories and essays in magazines including One Story, Epoch, and Subtropics. My work has earned me fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
I’m a native Illinoisan—born in Carbondale, raised in Normal—who’s also lived in Kentucky, Maryland, Louisiana, Colorado, Tennessee, and Florida. I’ve 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’m Distinguished University Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program.
Counting the Days 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’ illnesses by a call from his high school ex-girlfriend. In addition to letting him know his mom and dad are sick, his ex’s call triggers nostalgia for their shared past—and hints at a secret that could bring them together again.
With this novel, I wanted to write a story about a character I don’t often see in fiction: a smart, thoughtful person whose life hasn’t turned out the way he hoped it would, even though his life isn’t bad, it’s 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’t 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’s not a prize-winning poet.
I joke that I write about what’s 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’s dad is in the hospital, and his mother is having troubles that look a lot like the beginnings of dementia.
And I wanted to write a homecoming story. I’ve moved a lot, both as a kid and an adult, and I find wonderful the experience of going back to a place I’ve 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—or both—the kinds of figuring Stan does throughout the book.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Josh Russell’s novella Counting the Days in the spring of 2027.
