Home of Homo Vitruvius
Welcome
A writer’s renascent light against the darkness, shined through literature, culture, and ideas.
“Sing of human unscucess / in a rapture of distress”
Visit the Homo Vitruvius archive.
The past three months accessible for free, the entire vault with a one-month free trial of an annual subscription.
Come on in. Let me show you around.
Why read a writer?
Because you like what he says. You like the way he says it. He makes you think. He makes you feel. Maybe even, when it all goes right, he takes you somewhere: the air is a little thinner, it’s fragrant, there’s a certain kind of — luminous — light . . .
That’s what Homo Vitruvius is about: the rewards of language, the artifice of the written word. It’s the site — the stack — where every week I publish what I create out of words: essays on literature, culture, society, and all things human, with poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir added to the mix.
In all this, Homo Vitruvius serves a passionate dedication to the writing itself. To revise Wallace Stevens (“Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”), not just words about the ideas but the words themselves. The writing isn’t just a vehicle to a destination, a means to an end — it’s a destination. I hope you’ll find the travel its own reward.
As a professor of English, I’m also a reader. I’m a reader first. I write what I read of the world, the text of the world, which is mine and everyone’s passage through it, to be deciphered and interpreted, understood and mistaken: (“Sing of human unsuccess”). In various ways, then, my writing on Homo Vitruvius is often about reading. Why not read yourself how it all began, with my very first essay here:
The Publication Schedule (all arriving in your mailbox at 3 a.m. PST)
Homo Vitruvius aims to publish once a week, these days on Saturday mornings. The Substack offers not a commercial service but rather the gathered and arranged artifacts of my creative imagination and intellectual archaeology. The quality of what I present to you is more important to me than a rigid schedule.
Among my recent non-Substack publications are my 2021 poetry collection Waiting for Word published by Finishing Line Press.
In 2015, I was a featured writer in the inaugural issue of Footnote: a Literary Journal of History.
Currently, I’m serializing on Homo Vitruvius, as I write it, a book-length memoir, “an exercise in intellectual and spiritual accounting,” titled Reason for Being in the World.
I am also at work on a novel of the Sixteenth Century Magellan expedition’s circumnavigation of the Earth, The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena. I wrote about related topics in an earlier, regular feature of Homo Vitruvius called The Magellanic Diaries. I am at work, too, on a contemporary California noir novel, adapted from my screenplay, They Called It Paradise.
What you can find on Homo Vitruvius
Memoir
Creative nonfiction
Poetry
Essay on literature, culture, and society
There is much, much more in the vaulted archive with a paid subscription. I offer no paid-subscriber-only writing on Homo Vitruvius. Everything is free on first publication. After three months, all writing recedes from view into the archive. Subscribers of any kind, paid or free, are welcome and valued and offered the same work to read. But I no longer teach fulltime, and I write not as pastime but as vocation. Aside from the writing’s inherent worth, I can use the money to make a living, as almost any writer can. Aside from supporting writing you value, your paid subscription will purchase access to an archive that contains multiple books’ worth of my writing. In addition, with a paid subscription come, on request, a free digital download of Waiting for Word and, for purchase, signed copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
About the Home Vitruvius name and logo
Leonardo Da Vinci’s 1487 Renaissance and pre-Enlightenment drawing, known as Vitruvian man, inspired by ideas of the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio, sought to represent, in a man equally circumscribed by the circle and the square, a “Canon of Proportions”: a “cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). [Leonardo] believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe." That is, to see the human in the universe and the universe in the human, or, as I add, to think in proportion, even about the disproportionate.
Finally, for now, why not visit my writer website?
Thanks so much for reading. You read; therefore, the writer exists.
If you like writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, and emotional explorations that range, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll gain access to the full archive, beyond the 3-month paywall and a free digital download of Waiting for Word on request. You’ll also have the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote. Most importantly, you’ll be supporting writing you appreciate.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
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