C.B. Murphy  .:. Bio & Awards

C.B. Murphy is a bricoleur. This is a French word with no exact English equivalent, that he first encountered reading Claude Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind while a student at the University of Michigan. The term is used to describe the style exemplified by a tinkerer or a jack-of-all-trades. Bricoleurs are comfortable in unfamiliar realms of learning and experience because they learn best by using indirect connections to known information, even if the details are not spelled out. They try things out until they succeed. ^[1]

Back in college, Murphy wanted more than anything else to be an “experimental” filmmaker in the spirit of Stan Brakhage or perhaps Andy Warhol (though these are utterly incompatible styles), perhaps earning a PhD in cultural anthropology. Years later when he was selling railroad cars of lead and zinc from an office in downtown Chicago or having tea in a backroom of a trading house in Taipei waiting for his prototype of a magnetic koala bear to show up, he found himself wondering: where did all that go?

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“Jesus/Devil” painting won second place at the Fredericksburg Center For The Arts Show: Exploring Spirituality (March, 2007). The painting pictured here entitled “Lecture on Humans” was also in the show.

First prize at the
Southampton Writer’s Conference
Fiction Contest
July 2005