JK Fowler is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY who, in 2003, left for the US Peace Corps for a two year term in Lesotho. After finishing his term in 2005, he traveled to Cape Town, South Africa where he lived for close to two years while completing a semester of study in US and South Africa comparative "Whiteness" studies in the Sociology department at the University of Cape Town.
In early 2007, he returned to the States and not long after wrote, designed and published a poetry book compiling poems written while in South Africa entitled Argot. In mid-May he traveled to New York City, camped out in Harlem on a whim and not long after, Brooklyn, where he has remained until now. After working in finance, he made the nerve-wracking decision to focus on writing.
He is currently finishing his M.A. in International Affairs at The New School with a thesis which attempts to use a phenomenological approach to blur the lines between physical spaces (the "inanimate") and the human being or the "animate" by focusing in on three sites: the cubicle, Bellevue Hospital, and a development organization which will remain nameless for the time being.
In addition to The Mantle, he maintains a blog of flash and short fiction, poetry and articles, and academic papers at www.jkfowler.com and a compilation of past and in-process works, photography and audio interviews at www.roaminghills.com. His various travels to Europe, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, Lesotho, South Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, and Senegal have seeped into his work and the work he produces for others and his fascination with the networked and continually morphing relationships coursing throughout the world and New York City only seems to exponentially grow, a fact which simultaneously awes and occasionally overwhelms him.
Articles
JK's Blog
Passages on the Verge
So why “Passages on the Verge”? Because there just seems to be something to say about what’s not being said, a different way of seeing if we just tweak a few things, look differently, shift the focus. It’s the lover’s quarrel on the bleachers at a baseball game, the ice cream cone that falls out of the child's hand in the park, the man frowning on the subway car. Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and the rest of the New Journalism gang in their wonderful works shifted the focus from the “event” to the individuals on the fringe, the sentiments of the never-seen, that verge of the messy and complicated where stories were never black and white but balls of conflictual confusion.
In my blog entries, that’s what I’m going for: passages on the verge that are not neat, nor clearly defined, that try to bring to the fore a different perspective. It’s a tall order I know. But it’s also a lot of fun.
The map below creates a visual, international web of where the individual's interviewed are from as well as where they now live and work. No locations are exact of course to protect those involved, but it will be an increasingly interesting visual to watch as it evolves.
View Passages on the Verge in a larger map
