About

Originally from Massachusetts, I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia in 1992 because the UVA Creative Writing Program let me in and gave me some money. Besides, I’d been living in in Paris since 1987 and I was ready to come home. However, a short time later, I was living in the Econo Lodge on Emmet Street while I looked for an apartment in Charlottesville, asking myself, “I left Paris for this?”

Well, living in Charlottesville didn’t turn out too bad. I met alot of fine writers, and fine people who thought they were writers, and learned to write fiction well enough to get it published in a few respectable literary journals. Later, I took a job bartending in town and made some tremendous friends. 1994 to 1997 is a bit foggy, but it was wild and fun and I really got to know Charlottesville and I managed to publish some more fiction and meet a wild, wonderful girl and have a child. In 1997, I got a “respectable” marketing/advertising job with a local dot.com and thought I was well on my way to becoming a stock option millionaire…wouldn’t that have been something! Ah, but the dot.com was one of the many dot.bombs of the era, a house of cards built on promises of great wealth, perfectly timed to take advantage of a significant moment in history, the practical dawn of the Information Age, during which perfectly reasonable, successful people had faith in the most absurd business models.

Anyway, all that ended up being a blot on a perfectly romantic literary life, which I tried to recapture after the company went bust by spending a year-and-half learning to play golf, an ambition that greatly worried my pregnant-again wife, but that I felt sure would supply me with the wisdom to go on.

Sure enough, after considerable searching (and lots of putting practice), I found a job as a staff writer working for John Whitehead and his famed Rutherford Institute, thought to be a notorious Christian right-wing think tank and legal institute for representing Paula Jones in her sexual harrassment case against President Clinton, but in actuality a genuine civil rights legal organization, led by a man who considers The Beatles, George Orwell and Bob Dylan every bit as influential as Jesus Christ. By the time September 11 rolled around, I was so knowlegable about the Bill of Rights and so politicaly and culturaly engaged that its aftermath during the next two years was a feast of arguments and think pieces. Unlike most workplaces, all we did was talk and write about religion and politics at the Rutherford Institute, at a time when the two elements seemed to be transforming America right before our very eyes. Of course, now I see we were just struggling to come to terms with what happened, and that we mistakenly allowed–much like the dot.com era– a bunch of nutballs to run with some crazy ideas. As Bob Woodward suggested in Time Magazine recently, we all share the blame for Iraq and the sorry state of the Republic.

Well, eventually I left Rutherford and struck out on my own. Not wanting to leave Charlottesville, I freelanced for a while before Hawes Spencer at the Hook managed to slip me into a reporting job. And so here I am, slopping around in the intellectual muck I love best, thinking about all this new technology and writing blogs and stories about food and buildings and criminals and local winners and losers.

I like to think I’ve come a long way in learning how to turn a phrase, however stunted it still is. But don’t take it from me:

Dave McNair’s September 16, 2004, cover story, “Celebrity, Suicide and the Etiquette of Envy” raised the writing standards locally to Pulitzer levels. Insightful, deliberate, poignant, and brutally honest, this kind of writing makes me proud to have been published by the same folks. [The author won this year's Fiction Contest.--editor]

The title foretold it all and made me want to turn the pages. The article taught me something about the music industry I didn’t know– in a non-judgmental way– and gave us all something to ponder. Kudos to The Hook.
Sally Honenberger