Greg Bottoms – författare

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so be appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster's famous Paradise Gardens, his journey - of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle - is an unparalleled look at the lives and works of some of Finster's contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and neuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation, Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter's brutal murder.Along the way, Bottoms weaves a powerful narrative, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

A taut, powerful memoir of madness, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into schizophrenia. Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break - seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD - Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping, dramatic prose, the bizarre disappearances, the suicide attempts, and the shocking crime that lands Michael in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison. A work of nonfiction with the form and imagery of a novel, Angelhead enables the reader to witness not only the fragmenting of a mind but of a family as well.

"My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that."So begins Angelhead, a taut, powerful memoir of the madness and crime that rips a family apart. "I didn''t see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced."Set in Tidewater, Virginia, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled, schizophrenic descent of the author''s brother, Michael. Commencing with Michael''s first psychotic break at age 14 -- high on acid, seeing God in his suburban bedroom window -- through a series of petty crimes, bizarre disappearances, and suicide attempts to the shocking crime that landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison, Angelhead enables us to witness firsthand, as never before, the fragmenting of a mind and a family."I knew, still know, that he saw, in some form, His or Her or Its face."Bottoms shows, in pitch-perfect prose and with great empathy and dramatic tension, the psychological decline of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music, martial arts, and the occult, and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity. We not only see the effects Michael''s odd and increasingly violent behavior has on the people around him, but also come to understand how the author, now a successful writer and journalist, used the power of language and storytelling both to save himself and to forgive his brother. With the fast pace and seamless structure of the best crime writing and the moral sophistication and depth of our finest literature, Angelhead will challenge what we know about mental illness and its impact on us all. It is a brilliant work of unusual intensity."In his room he was having his first of many psychotic breaks. It came in the form of crippling guilt, ruthless introspection. He was Jesus being scolded by an angry Father. He wore sin, all sin, heavy as lead shackles. God made him look at himself and he was a stone with a minuscule heart."

In an intricately linked series of poetic, short tales set in a 1983 suburb, Greg Bottoms portrays his life as one of two “at-risk” boys as they attempt to learn how to be—and what it means to be—men. By turns funny, disquieting, and moving, Fight Scenes takes an unsparing look at juvenile disaffection and the dark side of white, working-class masculinity. By narrating his experiences with childhood buddy Mark, Bottoms shows how many of America’s young men learn to think about work, sex, weakness, violence, and themselves. In a pared-down, highly readable style that brings to mind the work of Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie, and Denis Johnson, Bottoms has created a work of literature that shows how even the most accepted forms of “toughness” can have a damaging, disorienting, and finally dehumanizing effect on everyone, especially kids.

In Spiritual American Trash, Greg Bottoms goes beyond the examination of eight “outsider artists” and inhabits the spirit of their work and stories in engaging vignettes. From the janitor who created a holy throne room out of scraps in a garage, to the lonely wartime mother who filled her home with driftwood replicas of Bible scenes, Bottoms illustrates the peculiar grace in madness.Using facts as scaffolding he constructs intimate narratives around each artist, painting their poor and difficult circumstances on the outskirts of American society and demonstrating struggle’s influence on their largely undiscovered art. Both mournful and celebratory, these profiles embrace these compulsive creators with empathy and visceral sensory details.Each sentence reads with the cadence of a preacher who engages the art of the spirit and passion that often strays into obsession. Raised in the working-class South as a devout Christian with a deeply troubled brother, Bottoms understands how these eight outsiders “made art for a higher power and for themselves.”

When Greg Bottoms runs into an old friend from high school, neither man is sure if it’s worth starting their first conversation in over a decade. As teens, they had run with a rough crowd—standard hooligans, in Bottoms’ mind, until his friend became cruel in his violence, exhibiting “pure, gleeful meanness.” Years later, as they cross paths at an ATM in their hometown, the friend can’t believe Bottoms went to college, grad school, is a writing professor with a wife and kids. The friend has been in and out of prison for drugs and drunken brawls, has a son with a black eye waiting in his truck.Such is the juxtaposition between Bottoms and many of his childhood acquaintances. In a southern town with starkly drawn class lines, crime was not uncommon. What Bottoms finds, though, is not so much a matter of social standing or economic opportunity, but the tragedy of untreated mental illness and its often deadly impact on anyone near the afflicted. Pitiful Criminals takes a close look at the author’s hometown to examine twelve cases of violence committed by those who were too young, too intoxicated, or too mentally unstable to truly know any better. Bookending these pieces is the story of Bottoms’ own brother, who, in a spiraling schizophrenic episode, set fire to the house with his sleeping family inside, convinced the home would be purged of his demons if he could just burn them out.

Swallowing the Past is a prose collection about ordinary lives in the ever-changing, postmodern South. A teenage killer ends up a smiling adult bridesmaid. A conservative Christian couple tells the story of a hate crime. A parable about a stolen bike illuminates how lying can be a survival technique. Meeting an old friend at an ATM turns into a meditation on how some people should die. The book closes with 'Grace Street,' a dream-like, genre-defying novella about the author's encounters with the locals on a poor city block in Richmond, Virginia, which becomes an eye-opening look at the old wounds of class, race, religious intolerance, and our particularly American brand of alienation.

One of the most famous political activists of all time, Emma Goldman was also infamous for her radical anarchist views and her “scandalous” personal life. In public, Goldman was a firebrand, confidently agitating for labor reform, anarchism, birth control, and women’s independence. But behind closed doors she was more vulnerable, especially when it came to the love of her life. Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman is an account of Goldman’s legendary career as a political activist. But it is more than that—it is a biography that offers an intimate look at how Goldman’s passion for social reform dovetailed with her passion for one man: Chicago activist, hobo king, and red-light district gynecologist Ben Reitman. Candace Falk takes us into the heart of their tumultuous love affair, finding that even as Goldman lectured on free love, she confronted her own intense jealousy.   As director of the Emma Goldman papers, Falk had access to over 40,000 writings by Goldman—including her private letters and notes—and she draws upon these archives to give us a rare insight into this brilliant, complex woman’s thoughts. The result is both a riveting love story and a primer on an exciting, explosive era in American politics and intellectual life.

Ghosts of My Old Dominion: Memory and History from the New South stares down the long shadow of the Civil War to reveal how the past haunts the present. Author Greg Bottoms writes fourteen autobiographical tales about his experiences growing up in working-class Virginia during the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a meticulously researched novella of the horrors and sorrows Walt Whitman faced while caring for injured Civil War soldiers in Virginia and D.C. _x000D_This ingenious blend of memoir, biography, and criticism uncovers not only the ghosts of history, but the ghosts of a life held together despite it all. Bottoms confronts the legacy of racism in the American South, including his own family's participation in "white flight" and matters of class and religion throughout his formative years, and cuts through the noise of our current era to remind us of essential human things. Ghosts of My Old Dominion is a book of true stories and a book about stories—how the personal and intimate moments in a life are always bled through with the colors of history.