Tim Weed
Tim Weed is the author of two books: a short fiction collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, named to the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Shortlist; and a novel, Will Poole’s Island, one of Bank Street College of Education’s Best Books of the Year. Tim is the winner of multiple Writer’s Digest Fiction Awards and has been shortlisted for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, and the Prism Prize in Climate Literature. His nonfiction has appeared in Literary Hub, The Millions, The Writer’s Chronicle, Talking Points Memo, and elsewhere.
Q: What is the first book you remember reading or having read to you as a child?
A: The Hobbit
Q: Do you have a favourite quote? (From a book, film, song, speech…)
A: ‘Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.’ —Rebecca Solnit
Q: What superpower would you like to have and why?
A: Immortal life, maybe? Because then I could see the trees I’ve planted fully mature, and check in on my descendants from time to time. Assuming humanity hasn’t gone extinct, that is.
