Joshua M. Bigley

Joshua Michael Bigley was born in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York on a farm with over 80 horses long in the tooth.  He has an older brother and a younger sister.  His father talked to cows and farmers on the radio, gave rides in a sleigh festooned with jingle bells and poured cheap beer as the proprietor of a tavern named the Junction--where there's always a function.  And then vanished.  He rode west following the sun and turned up on a Navajo reservation cowboying and teaching earth science.  Joshua's mother moved to Syracuse and married the Iceman, founder of Ice Systems of America.  When he was still a child he discovered a time-machine in the wood-cellar/wine-cellar/bomb-shelter, crept through cretaceous jungles and was bowled over by a charging pachycephelsaurus, gored by a frenzying stygimoloch when he mistakenly wandered into its spawning grounds, feasted on the precious eggs of an archeaopteryx, ancestor to birds, and was nearly sacrificed by an Aztec priest-king millions of years later.  He stopped traveling in time after that and only does it now, on rare occasions, when he's got time.

 

Joshua reads and writes everything from political non-fiction to fantasy and literary fiction.  Some of his favorite authors are George Saunders, Sherman Alexie, Don Delillo, Raymond Carver, Andrew Cowan, Leonard Michaels, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, China Miélville, Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip K. Dick, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Arundhati Roy, Isabel Allende, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Nicholas Monsarrat, Stephen King, Khaled Hosseini, George R.R. Martin, William Faulkner, Tobias Wolff, Gao Xingjian, Mo Yan, and Homer.  He also likes reading Noam Chomsky, Michael Eric Dyson, Karen Armstrong, W.E.B Du Bois, Howard Zinn, Haki Madhubuti, Cornel West, and Colin Woodard, among others. And he loves a good essay. 

 

Circle Zebra began with a few short stories he wrote as an undergraduate of literature and writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.  On the MFA at East Anglia, he wrote more navy stories and started shaping an anthology based on his experiences he had serving aboard the aircraft carriers USS America and USS George Washington.  The short stories were good pieces and he enjoyed writing them but the characters kept pushing him for more and some of the malingerers and agitators threatened him with mutinous actions unless he deployed them on a long voyage.  There were insurrections.  Even sabotage.  So, he agreed to hear their grievances and before long they appointed a bluejacket leader and in that twilight hour, the time of no horizon, Joshua looked at his hands and realized he was dealing with a sailor's union.  They wanted to fight.  They wanted to be immortal.  And so with breasts heroic he sent them afar... on the final voyage of USS America through hurricane and fire.  The novel was deployed.  

 

He is also writing some speculative fiction and an analysis of the U.S. Constitution with proposed amendments. He taught literary theory, writing, film, western society, and the art of public speaking at Nanchang University, Dalian Maritime University, and Dalian University of Technology.  He lived in China for thirteen years, is currently traveling in Time, and longs to return to Syracuse New York where he will wander the forests, swim naked in waterfalls, and join the growing Green movement.