Bio:Edward R. Morris

Edward Morris was born on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, on the same day in 1975 as Sean Lennon. His family settled in rural central Pennsylvania when he was five, eventually buying a house in Hollidaysburg, home of the Slinky and Senator Harry J. Anslinger (father of the Harrison Narcotics Act.)

In 1993, a year of great family misfortune and personal spiritual revelation, under the aegis of English teacher Russell Stiles, Pennsylvania Senate president pro tem Robert Jubelirer, and former American Poetry Review editor Deborah Burnham, Morris attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in 1993 and rode the creative wave from that experience to Temple University the following year, majoring in Screenwriting. In college, Morris received critical feedback from director Kevin Smith (‘Dogma’, ‘Chasing Amy’) and sf author S.N. Lewitt (Blind Justice.) Morris nominally graduated from Temple University, and began a journeyman career in alcoholism and mental illness which he’d been training for since age five.

That went well. Morris emigrated to the West Coast in 1999. A long love-hate tour of duty in the Bay Area left him with one brief experience at writing for Open City, the descendant of Allen Cohen’s famous San Francisco Oracle. The days of the Oracle are no more, however, and Morris was forced to relocate to Portland, Oregon for reasons of sanity and gainful employment. Since moving to the City of Roses, his work has taken off on the shoulders of many different giants.

Morris’ sadly-unprintable 9/11 Batman story “How Can I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today?” was read by DC Comics’ Pete Woods, penciller on the Robin series. [www.dccomics.com] NASA tech and Pathfinder op Geoffrey A. Landis, author of Mars Crossing, ‘A Long Time Dying’, and dozens of other cutting-edge works, has volunteered his technical know-how for a number of the more difficult concepts in Morris’ Blackguard series, including working space-elevators, brain-interfacing processors, and a quantum supercomputer based on the ancient numerology of the Hebrew Kaballah.

While living in the ‘functional anarchy’ of Portland’s West End during the Great Blizzard of 2003, Morris discovered the great Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, another pair of wonderful teachers. In turn, Jeff put Morris onto Paul Di Filippo, spawning yet another years- and miles-long correspondence. Paul has pulled Edward Morris off the creative ledge more than once, and deserves some sort of medal for this.

In 2004, Morris was honored to receive permission from Richard and Jennifer Lee Pryor to use Richard Pryor’s classic ‘Bicentennial Nigger’ speech in his sf novel The Long Black Veil. In the story, a young black kid growing up in a stone-racist honkytown (and ironically a former stop on the Underground Railroad) is asked by his History teacher to memorize Dr. King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech for class. Instead, young Mackie Walker gets up in front of the room, deadpan, and launches into Pryor’s scathing indictment of the American Bicentennial, verbatim: “You know how black humor started? On slave ships. Cat was on his way there, rowin’, and dude says ‘What you laughin’ about?’ He says, ‘Yesterday, I was a king…’ “ *

(*©1976 Warner Bros. Records, used by permission of the artist) [www.richardpryor.com]

In August 2005, sf giant Philip José Farmer (The World of Tiers, Riverworld, Doc Savage and Tarzan series, et.al.) greenlighted Morris’ short story “Infamy” for publication. Based on a comment Morris’ father once made which switched the oeuvres of William S. and Edgar Rice Burroughs, respectively, “Infamy” was said by editors at Interzone and MFSF to resemble Farmer’s “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod” too closely. In response, Farmer’s webmaster Mike had this to say:

“I heard back from Phil and he has no problem with you trying to publish the  story. He did say however that you might get a lot of mail from people accusing you of stealing the idea from him.

My suggestion, for what it’s worth, is that either in a preface or endnote you explain how you came up with the idea, and how several people pointed out that Phil had already done it. How you then contacted Phil and he gave his blessing. Let me first say that I am already looking forward to following your writing career [... ]Telling the story behind the story … turned out to be both entertaining and educational, which incidentally is one of things that I love about Phil's work.” [www.pjfarmer.com]

This is just a fractured sketch, to be updated PRN...