Jeffrey Round: Biography

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: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery, was published by the Haworth Press in 2007 and republished by Cormorant Books in Canada. Both books were listed on AfterElton’s Top 50 Greatest Gay Books for 2008.

In 2009, Cormorant published Death In Key West, the second Bradford Fairfax murder mystery. The third volume in the series, Vanished In Vallarta, is set for spring 2010. His literary novel about the Bosnian war, The Honey Locust, is scheduled for a fall 2009 publication.

In 2005, Jeffrey was nominated for the KM Hunter Artists Award for Literature for a body of work that includes short fiction, 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 producer John Davison. His first full-length play, Zebra, about the murder of librarian Kenneth Zeller, won the Gay and Lesbian Appeal’s Right to Privacy Award and was nominated for a Pink Trillium for Best Gay Play.

In addition to his alternative theatre work, Jeffrey was also the stage director for Agatha Christie’s long-running hit, The Mousetrap, for three of its record-breaking years in Toronto.

In 1990, Jeffrey founded The Church-Wellesley Review, Canada's first annual print journal for gay and lesbian creative writing. It ran for eleven years, eventually expanding into an on-line quarterly and reading series under the same name. In 2008, he began a new reading series, Proust and Company, co-hosted by Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto.

Jeffrey has worked as a producer and writer for Alliance-Atlantis and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He is also a composer. Currently he is writing a suite of songs based on lyrics by Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare, and others, for acclaimed soprano Lilac Caña. The work will premiere at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in September 2009.

Jeffrey holds 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. I was born in Sudbury, Canada’s ugliest city. Sudbury sits in a basin formed by the impact of a giant meteorite. When I lived there, it was the nickel capital of the world. It may still be. There were rumours the downtown was built on quicksand or maybe a swamp.

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 1966, we moved to Windsor, where I first heard Motown music, which I still love. In 1967, two important events occurred: I wrote my first poem 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 gunfire across the river. It was just like television. Not long afterwards, my poem won Honourable Mention in a school poetry contest. I was going to be a writer.

Later, we moved back to Sudbury, where I grew my hair and took up drawing and guitar and illegal drugs. I was going to be an artist. Not much else happened then. In the early-70s, we moved to Dartmouth, Canada’s second-ugliest city. My high school was so poor it couldn’t afford an art program. Bad news for my artistic ambitions. Worse, I didn’t blend in with the other kids: I talked about Picasso, 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, who encouraged my weirdness. Through Jim Farmer, I discovered a love for classical music and began to write songs. I was going to be a composer. Through Sarah McRae, 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? Cool!”

At university, I enrolled in Theatre classes. I was going to be an actor. There, I 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 pretty weird. Some of them even seemed to be trying to be weird. I didn't want to be like that. I went back to writing. It wasn’t till years later that I realized out of all the creative types writers are the weirdest.

Years passed. I moved to Toronto, fell in love and had my heart kicked around. I escaped to Europe to become a fashion model. While travelling around that summer, I had the strangest 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. The 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 writer, go elsewhere to publish? 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 scathing review was from Toronto’s Globe (Boo!) Clearly, mainstream Canada was still not ready for gay writing.

Patriot that I am, I slogged my second novel around to the same Canadian publishers, thinking how welcoming they’d now be. I’d proved myself, hadn’t I? Cage had sold nearly 5000 copies around the globe—small potatoes for some, but not bad for a first time Canadian author. And my 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. I had no answer, so I got on with my life.

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 (very long story omitted), 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. (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 this time 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. Once 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 now ex-agent, a very sweet woman with a very stubborn, conservative bent. She gave me heart failure when she insisted she try it on Canadian publishers first: “After all, you’re Canadian, dear!” she said. “No way,” I replied. “I’ve done that shit before.” Glowering didn’t work. 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, even if Canadians were out to lunch. They were, and yes, they loved my book. The only problem was telling my agent, since I’d just broken rule number one of my contract: don’t sell anything yourself. I’d lived in the CanLit ghetto far too long to let that stop me, however. 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. She refused, again. Rather than kill her, I persisted in my demands, and so it came to pass that I finally sold my second novel. And, yes, that woman is no longer my agent, by mutual agreement. (The moral of this story, kids: don’t get stuck in the CanLit ghetto.)

In the meantime, I’ve been writing. Death In Key West, the second volume in the Bradford Fairfax series has just been released as of summer 2009. A third volume, Vanished in Vallarta, is complete, with more books in the works. Even better, there’s talk of a television series. (Just talk, so far, mind you, but wouldn’t it be lovely to make some money for once.)

Happily, my literary writing seems to have come round as well. The Honey Locust, about a Canadian journalist who goes to the Bosnian war, is also due out later this year from Cormorant Books. Now, of course, I’ll have to worry about being slotted. Which side of the fence will the critics sit me on—genre writer or literary writer?

I have a suggestion: let me be both.