Courtesy Photo | Kody Ford, the founder and editor of art mag The Idle Class, is the featured reader this Tuesday, Aug. 30, at Nightbird Books.
Kody Ford goes through spurts of creativity, satisfies his need to write, and then hibernates for a while. And then the urge overcomes him again, so he does something about it. A familiar pattern — the life of a writer.
Ford, the founder and editor of art mag The Idle Class, is the featured reader this Tuesday, Aug. 30, at Nightbird Books. The event, hosted by the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective, begins at 7 p.m. sharp and is free to the public. An open mic will take place before and after Ford is featured.
While his reading list is still a work in progress, Ford confirmed that he will recite Playing House, a short story about a guy coming to terms with whether to embrace the future or live in the past — an eternal conundrum that bedevils all of us. At just 1,300 words, the short story is indeed short.
But back to his process.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “I get an itch, scratch it, and then I feel better for a while.”
His fiction is set in Arkansas, the source of his creative impulses.
Writing since 2000, Ford’s influences include Joan Didion, Douglas Copeland, Charles Portis, and Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, who he recently met in St. Louis. Referencing Palahniuk’s gracious nature, Ford said, “I aspire to be as call as he is with other writers and with his readers.”
The 35-year-old El Dorado native moved to Northwest Arkansas in 2005. The son of a minister and a butcher’s daughter, Ford began writing fiction after a friend recommended Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, a book that opened up the exciting possibilities of the written word.
Ford holds a degree in communications and writing from the University of Central Arkansas, and a master’s in communication from the University of Arkansas. He currently lives in Fayetteville.
