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 edited/co-authored 7 math workbooks for a statistical company creating original workbooks for grades K-6. In 2008, he wrote, designed and published a poetry book entitled Argot. His various travels to Europe, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, Lesotho, South Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, and Senegal imbue his work and the work he produces for others with an international flare of creative and aesthetic appeal. He is currently working on his M.A. in International Affairs at The New School with a thesis centering on the interrelated expansion of vision as it pertains to race in international aid and development, neuroscience, and the many remnants of the Enlightenment period.
In addition to The Mantle, he maintains a blog of short fiction, poetry and articles at www.jkfowler.com and a compilation of past and in-process works at www.roaminghills.com.
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
