Daulton Dickey

What is the meaning of life?

Nice try, but you'll receive no answer from Daulton Dickey. As an existentialist, he doesn't accept the assertion that life has meaning, but, even if he accepted such an assertion, he'd refrain from heady conversations in his bio. To be honest, he's not certain why we broached the topic, and he doesn't understand why no one expunged this paragraph.

But anyway ...

Here's the thing:

Daulton wrote his first novel at age fifteen, shortly after discovering Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Lost in the adventures of the Beat Generation, as well as the Lost Generation, he spent several years writing poorly plotted, somewhat meandering novels in a futile attempt to define his generation--as if a single author's oeuvre could encapsulate a generation composed of hundreds of millions of people.

After stumbling on metafiction and avant-garde art and fiction, analytic philosophy and cognitive science, art and literary theory, he found himself wandering down a road in which he could attempt to answer certain questions about these experiences we refer to as "existence" and "reality."

Wittgenstein, Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio, and William Gaddis--names which frequently appear in his writings. If you're not familiar with them, you might learn a thing or two. Or not. Daulton's hit or miss when it comes to didacticism. Sometimes he take the dialectic approach and sometimes, when he's feeling lazy, he doesn't. And to tell the truth, he's developed a penchant for laziness over the years.

But he's not above potty humor. He loves a good fart joke as much as the next bloke. (Hey! He's a poet and he didn't know it.) (As a further aside, and, yes, we just employed two parenthetical statements back-to-back, which is not something you'll encounter in his writing; he hates parentheses. But, anyway, where were we? Ah, yes ... As a further aside: Did you know the oldest recorded joke dates from the 2nd Millennium BCE? And it's a fart joke? True story. Here it is: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Yes, those Sumerians were capital-h hilarious.)

When he's not writing, Daulton works in an auto parts store. When he's not working, he's hanging out with his amazing wife, Alice--his amazing pregnant wife!--and his two sons. He lives in a fortified bunker somewhere in Indiana, although only part of this statement is true. He's written for several prominent websites, including PopMatters and Film Threat. Last year, he self-published Elegiac Machinations, an experimental novella.

Also, we should note that, for some reason, he finds these symbols " " aesthetically unappealing, so, ripping off Joyce and Gaddis, he prefers to denote dialogue with the good old em dash, which is this: --.

--I told you not to include that, he said, on reading this. --Why would you include that?

To which we replied, "Fine. Then we won't."

To which he replied, --Your fired.

Also, he's an asshole.

A NOTE FROM DAULTON: I chose to keep the last sentence intact to justify firing my official Author's Bio writers without pay. I would rewrite the entire bio, but I can be lazy, which is why I didn't expunge the opening paragraphs.