Motorcycles, Minotaurs, & Banjos: A Modest Odyssey

This book is about twenty-one days, and sixty years. A motorcycle ride down the spine of Appalachia, with a little banjo and big myth for company, to play and sing at the graves of dead banjo heroes. About making a life about making work. This book is about outsiders. Interlopers. Class migrants. Motorcycles. Myths of all sorts. Death. Decisions. Awakening. Creative Process. Growth through risk-taking. It's a book about ghosts. Music. Writing. Not writing. What's this book not about? "Finding myself." I know who I am. Steven Sherrill is a high school dropout, a nearly retired professor, a family man, a ne'er-do-well banjo player, a motorcyclist, an aquarist, a sonic/video muckraker, and a novelist with five books in the world, one of which (The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break) is a cult classic.

About the Author :
Steven Sherrill is not, absolutely not, a traditional academic, nor a scholar. Steven Sherrill is definitely a wannabe musician. And an enthusiastic but mediocre painter. And a lifelong motorcyclist. He will not say whether or not he, like the Minotaur, has horns, but Steven Sherrill has been making trouble with words since eighth grade, when he was suspended from school for two weeks for a story he wrote. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade, ricocheted around the southern US for years, eventually earning a Welding Diploma from a community college, which led circuitously to an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and finally to the role of Professor of English and Integrative Arts at Penn State University, with five novels in the world. His first novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, has been translated into eight languages and was released as an audio book by Neil Gaiman Productions. His second novel, Visits From the Drowned Girl, published by Random House (and nominated by them for the Pulitzer Prize) in the US and Canongate in the UK, was released in June of 2004. The Locktender's House, novel number three, was released by Random House in the spring of 2008. In November 2010, CW Books released the poetry collection, Ersatz Anatomy. Louisiana State University Press: Yellow Shoe Fiction Series released the novel Joy, PA in March 2015. Most recently, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time was published in the fall of 2016 and lauded by Alan Gurganus in The New York Times Book Review. There's another underway. It took those five novels and all those that never saw publication, eleven motorcycles, one trip over the hood of a Buick, two smart and beautiful daughters, more banjos and synthesizers than ought to be allowed, and sixty-one loops in the annual orbit to get to the ride this book is about.