C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

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?

Determined either to find out or commit to his executive lifestyle with fervor, he went to visit a man named Bob who ran a company called Business Testing.

Bob had just told a friend of Murphy’s to stop being a photographic assistant for a National Geographic photographer and go to medical school, so Murphy assumed Bob would tell him to stop messing around and get a masters degree in business. Bob looked a bit like Carl Jung. Looking Murphy straight in the eye, he said, “I just heard I have terminal cancer. Do you still want to work with me?”

Murphy, surprised, fascinated and a bit frightened said, “Yes.”

Bob leaned toward him and asked said, “What was it you wanted to do when you first went to college?”

Murphy answered, “Make movies, I mean, uh, films.”

“Ah, so you should go to film school then.”

“But,” Murphy protested. “I’m married. I have kids. And more importantly I don’t see myself going to school with the spoiled grandkids of Stephen Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola.”

Bob smiled as if he had heard resistance before. “Just go investigate,” he said.

This is how Murphy arrived at his first writing class. All the filmmakers he talked to said, “You don’t want to be behind the camera, do you? Then you have to write. Writing is where the creativity is.”

At the time, Murphy thought (but didn’t say) that when he was in college he wanted to be a non-narrative filmmaker, something that didn’t involve scripts. He kept quiet because he knew (see “Self Interview” for expansion) that non-narrative film was “so over”. So Murphy went to Minneapolis’ Loft Literary Center and signed up for a class. His first story “Greenman” made his teacher laugh and his wife cry and he was off. He started to write a novel about UFO abductees (”Land Somewhere Else,” still in draft) until a second teacher confronted him: “You have to write about something you feel strongly about,” he said, implying alien abductees were more appropriate for The National Enquirer. Too embarrassed to say that, being a bricoleur, he felt as strongly about alien abductees as about most other things, Murphy began writing about a dysfunctional family who was dealing with the politics of suburban deer. Deep Ecology became his first completed novel.

A writing teacher told Murphy to find portals in his life that he hadn’t gone through and to send his characters through them. One portal was easy: how did he go from a filmmaker-wannabe to business executive? Adding the question, What would happen to the executive character if confronted by old friends who remained wild filmmakers? provided the seed for Murphy’s second novel, The End of Men.

Murphy has received some encouragement along the way. Ellipsis Magazine out of Salt Lake City published a chapter of Deep Ecology as the short story, “Free the Deer” in its June 2001 issue. In July 2005, a chapter of The End of Men won first prize for fiction at the Southampton College Writers Workshop.

Murphy has also published a short story (”Notes on the Alaskan Antigravity Film”) in IO Magazine and nonfiction in Minnesota Lawyer and HOW Magazine.

Murphy’s short films have been shown at colleges, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and at the Willis Gallery in Detroit. Murphy’s cartoon series (”CB Murphy“) appeared in the alternative weekly, The Chicago Reader. Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art selected one of Murphy’s books-January is Alien Registration Month-for its permanent Artists’ Books collection. Murphy’s illustrations-drawings, paintings and computer-generated photo collages-have appeared in many national magazines.

Murphy is currently working in acrylic paints and has produced a collection of “neo-folk” pieces, many of which were inspired by the research he began for The End of Men.

Murphy studied anthropology and geography at the University of Michigan, and received his BA in geography from the University of Minnesota where he studied “perceptual geography” under Yi-Fu Tuan (author of Escapism and The Good Life).

Murphy has worked in investments, commodity trading, mining, product development, and idea-generation for manufacturing firms. His work has taken him to Europe and Asia. Murphy currently writes in the river valley town of Marine on Saint Croix, north of St Paul, MN, in a home he shares with his wife and their two sons.

Writing Mentors

Murphy has worked most recently with Melissa Bank (The Wonder Spot) at Southampton College, and Mark Wisniewski (”All Weekend with the Lights On”). He has also studied with Ian Leask (”Wounded and other Stories”) and Linda Lightsey Rice (”Southern Exposure”). Murphy currently works with Pushcart Prize and Tobias Wolff Award winner Mark Wisniewski.

Footnotes

^[1] Definition from www.bricoleur.org