Jeffrey Round: Biography

HOME	BIO	BOOKS	FILM & VIDEO	PLAYS	BLOG	OTHER WRITING	CONTACT

Jeffrey Round is an award-winning writer, director and playwright.

His first novel, A Cage of Bones, was published in 1997 by the Gay Men’s Press (UK). It garnered acclaim and topped bestseller lists in Canada, the US, Iceland, Australia and others. His second novel, The P’Town Murders, was published by the Haworth Press' Southern Tier Editions in Summer 2007. His third novel, The Honey Locust, is scheduled for publication by Cormorant Books in 2009.

In 2005, Jeffrey was nominated for the K.M. Hunter Artists Award for Literature for a body of work that includes short stories, poetry and a novel-in-progress. His short film My Heart Belongs to Daddy premiered at the Director’s View Film Festival in 2002 and won awards for Best Director and Best Use of Music at the Hollywood North Movie Festival.

Jeffrey founded and co-ran Best Boys Productions, an alternative theatre company, with his then-partner John Davison. For his first full-length play, Zebra, about the murder of librarian Kenneth Zeller, he won the Gay and Lesbian Appeal’s Right to Privacy Award and was nominated for a Pink Trillium.

Jeffrey also founded The Church-Wellesley Review (1990-2001), Canada's first print journal for gay and lesbian creative writing, as well as an on-line quarterly and reading series. He was also assistant editor for Xtra! Magazine.

More recently he has worked as a producer and writer for Alliance Atlantis and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Jeffrey has a degree in English Literature from Dalhousie University, where he also studied classical guitar and theatre. He is a graduate from the Humber School for Writers and attended Ryerson University’s Film and Television program.

An alternative bio note…

I was born in the wagon of a travellin’ show…

Erm, no, that was someone else. Actually, I was born in Sudbury, Canada’s ugliest city. Sudbury sits in a basin formed by the implosion of a giant meteorite. When I lived there it was the nickel capital of the world. It may still be. There are rumours the downtown was built on quicksand.

As a kid, I used to run along the slag heaps with my Collie dog, Tammy. When I was four, my parents gave Tammy away. Later, Tammy ran away from her new owners to look for me. For years I wandered the railway tracks hoping to find her, but I never did.

In the mid-60s we moved to Windsor, where I first heard Motown music, which I still love. In the summer of 1967, two important events occurred: I went to Expo ’67 and Detroit burned. It was the Summer of Love, and Motor City was convulsed with race riots. My friend Sherry King and I would sit in her bedroom watching the smoke rise and listening to the gunfire across the river. It was just like television. At Expo I learned that French was another language.

In 1968 we moved back to Sudbury where I grew my hair, wrote poetry and took up guitar and illegal drugs. Not much else happened then.

In 1972 we moved to Dartmouth, Canada’s second-ugliest city. My high school was so poor it couldn’t afford an art program. Worse, I didn’t blend in with the other kids: I talked about George Gershwin and Led Zeppelin in the same sentence, when lobster fishing, coal mining and Anne Murray would have been more apt. Fortunately, I had a brilliant music teacher, James Farmer, and an engaging English teacher, Sarah McRae. They encouraged my weirdness.

Around that time I discovered The Great Gatsby. I had my first literary orgasm reading the passage where Nick discovers Daisy and Jordan lounging on the sofa. “Wow!” I thought. “You can do that with writing?” It clinched my decision to be a writer.

At university, I enrolled in theatre class and experienced my first bout of chronic depression. Like many of my idols—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, James Dean—I suffered from debilitating emotional swings. I was also freaked out by my fellow thespians: I thought they were weird. Some of them seemed to be trying to be weird. I went back to writing. It wasn’t till years later I realized that out of all the creative types writers are the weirdest.

Years passed. I moved to Toronto and I became a fashion model while waiting for my writing career to kick in. Travelling in Europe one summer, I kept having the eerie feeling I was living in somebody’s novel. I was -- mine. The people I met and the experiences I had seemed to be adding up to something. When I came home I decided to do what I’d always wanted to do: write.

A Cage of Bones was turned down by every major and minor publisher in Canada—some twice if I waited long enough for a change in editors to slip it into their slush piles again. I couldn’t understand why no one would buy it. That word would be ‘market.’ I hadn’t a clue what sold, just what I liked to read, usually dreary books by suicidal authors whose acclaim was far greater in death than in life.

I don’t recall who asked (but bless you, bless you, bless you!) if I’d tried to sell my book outside Canada. What? Me, a Canadian, go elsewhere? Not on your life! (On mine, maybe.) But it began to sink in: the Canadian market couldn’t support writers who intended to earn a living writing fiction.

I tossed off two letters: one to the states, the other to England. Within two months I had a ‘yes’ from the American publisher and a ‘maybe’ from the Brit. Being masochistic I took the ‘maybe’, reworked my manuscript and got my first book contract.

I scored nicely with that little novel, watching it climb onto bestseller lists in places as diverse and far away as Australia and Iceland. I also got some very good reviews internationally from people who clearly liked what I was writing. Tellingly, my only bad review was from Toronto’s Globe (Boo!)

I began to slog my second novel around to the same Canadian publishers, thinking how welcoming they’d be now. I’d proved myself, hadn’t I? Cage sold nearly 5000 copies around the globe—small potatoes for some, but not bad for a first time Canadian author. And this new book was the great novel I’d always intended to write. Surely people would see that. But the chorus of no’s grew louder than Handel’s Hallelujahs.

Why? It’s one of the ugliest questions a writer can ask.

In 2004, I drove to Provincetown, a place I invariably end up in on Labour Day. (I love the crowds, I hate the crowds, so I stay away in summer and it always seems to be Labour Day when I arrive.) Somehow, I ended up in a beautiful palazzo belonging to a man named Ned Bradford, whom I have never met and whose great-great-whatever grandfather was Captain Bradford of the Mayflower fame. (They first landed at Provincetown, right?)

One day while showering in Ned’s marble tiled bathroom, I looked out the window to see a pair of binoculars trained … on me. I flashed the guy and exited, but not before I’d had a flash of my own—one of being spied on, shot at and so on. I was in another novel, but in a genre I’d never considered: comic mystery. I already knew the title: The P’Town Murders.

Did I struggle with it? Me, a serious literary author writing for fun and profit? Yes, for about three seconds. That was all I had before the ideas came burbling out and I started scribbling. Again, I kept meeting people I felt belonged in a book: good guys, bad guys and plain old weirdoes (P’town’s full of them.) And pretty soon, they were!

I wrote for 18 days straight, producing a first draft at a phenomenal (for me) rate of about 2,500 words per day. I polished it over the next five months and sent it off to my agent, who gave me heart failure when she insisted she try it on Canadian publishers first: “After all, you’re Canadian, dear!” No way, I said, but she wouldn’t budge—it was Canada first, or else!

OK, I thought—there’s more than one way to skin a stone, or two birds, or whatever it is. I contacted the Haworth Press, who’d recently published my short story, A Perfect Time To Be In Paris. No doubt the Americans were looking for something hot, fun and consumer-friendly. They were. I told my agent I’d heard a rumour they were looking for a book exactly like P’Town, and could she please send it.

There are more tales forthcoming featuring P’Town’s characters, Bradford Fairfax and his blue-haired sidekick, Zach Tyler. The second, Death in Key West, is nearly completed and a third, Vanished in Vallarta, is in the works. A fourth and fifth are planned. And while I’d prefer to be a writer like Ethan Mordden, I might settle for being the gay Franklin W Dixon. Come to think of it, Ethan already is that. Maybe I should prefer to be this century’s Oscar Wilde—minus the trial, of course.