About The Author

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   D. G Radford is mostly known publicly for his teaching career. One that has led him from teaching second graders to teaching junior and senior high school to undergraduates and graduate school students. He has played guitar most of his life but admits to being unusually average. 

    Radford credits his poetry with helping him keep his pen on the paper. He believes that eating an oyster is where both parties to the act are on equal footing. 

He has four fine young men who allow him to call them sons. He is something of a Civil War buff mainly because the news today can be so disturbing he at least knows how that era turned out. He wishes he had put in more time and effort into coaching little league baseball and town league soccer. 

    The American author he admires most is Hemingway. Radford will cook you a savory meal and proceed to talk your head off. If you are not careful he will borrow every good idea you have ever had and make it his own. He splits his time between Falmouth Massachusetts and Venice Florida. On some level it had to do with bring a libra.

Soup: my style of writing is soupy.  I will rewrite before I’m finished with a piece, I will story board some, I’ll have characters write me letters, I’ll jump across chapters.  I write on paper, computer screens and envelops.  Eventually a Master copy develops.  A body of work becomes a formal destination for new pages.  Pages of writing that gained entry for one reason or another into the Master copy.

    What gains entry?  I like good dialog.  Dialog has such immediacy.  I will also try to show a part of the message through the setting.  The environment surrounding the characters and action plays a part in who they are and what they do. A stylistic observation is that I like surprise.  I like to slant the action of my characters or the situation and setting so that plausible outcomes are slightly twisted: possible but unexpected.

    I make solid effort to bring the pages close to the reader.  My narrator is not talking to the reader from a great distance in time or space.  The narrator is right there on the page and at times actually attempting to converse directly with the reader.  A point of style here would be I don’t lean into the narrator very much.  I am attempting to show as much of what I have to say as possible and not direct or dictate any more than necessary. I don’t use an all knowing voice very much but as I’ve said before I do use every possible ploy to deliver a lively story.   Most of my effort is made trying to get the reader to see and hear what my characters are saying.  This stylistic technique is expected to draw the reader in and allow the reader to make up one’s own mind about what is being witnessed without the narrator telling the reader what to think or how to respond.

    Word choice, the length of sentences, the use of sensory detail, these too are points when considering style.  A word such as anticlinal would never make it into my final draft.  I’d work it back to ‘sloping in the opposite direction’.  Long winding river like sentences are rare in my work.  I am more the staccato, bam, bam, bam sort of writer.  I don’t believe the modern mind is compatible with expressions stretched to a mile in length.  Strawberries dipped in white chocolate, or the salty char on a grilled steak can be used to connect to a reader’s sensory experience.  Often the effort is not to push the story line but simply another means of having my reader experience something while on one of my pages.