“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

Platte Canyon Review

Vol.1. 1 October, 2015

Literary Fiction and Legal Satire

by Craig Chambers, author of  F*ck You, Your Honor

Fuck You, Your Honor, published by Black Letter Editions

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”  Muriel Rukeyser

I am the author of Fuck You, Your Honor, a satire on the legal system. I was a literature student long before I became an attorney. A lawyer is a writer, anyway, writing a motion or a brief for an audience of one, the judge.

Becoming a lawyer helped my writing become clear and direct. But I still can quote an obscure poet, like Muriel Rukeyser, along with the best of my old lit major friends — most of whom spent their careers at community colleges as English professors teaching English composition.

This first blog is to acknowledge some of the writers  who have influenced me. Here’s to my more learned masters: John Ashbery, Edwin Morgan, Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, Lisel Mueller, W.S. Merwin, Charles Simic, Frank O’Hara, and The British Revivalist Poets of the ’70’s and ’80’s.

And here’s to their fiction-writer counter-parts: Milan Kundera, Saul Bellow, Jerzy Kosinski, Mavis Gallant, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Vladmir Nabokov.