Phoenix

Phoenix is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, and serious thinker, who has completed over sixty books, and six plays. He has been working hard on writing fiction, short stories, philosophy, poetry, and drama. He enjoys the creative process highly, and it gives him much hope.

Check out Phoenix's YouTube channel, where he talks about philosophy and reads from his writings, here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC33PoxeKqjGNrJoMcqibsfw

Find Phoenix on Twitter, @The_Street_Kid

Phoenix is the staff writer and editor for the non-profit humanitarian organization The Legacy Initiative, where he writes pieces about his experiences with serving the homeless population, and edits pieces the organization feels is appropriate and that fit the core values of the organization. You can find his pieces about his experiences while serving the homeless at legacyinitiative.org, under the menu tab Our Experiences.

In the recent past, Phoenix has published four short stories for four separate magazines, stories with the following titles: A Sinner's Remorse, Everything Is Death, Determination Force, and The Last Station. His short stories, under his name Stephan Heard, can be found at the following magazines and links: Liquid Imagination (http://liquidimagination.silverpen.org/article/a-sinners-remorse-by-stephan-heard/) and Voluted Tales (http://volutedtales.com/issue/darkness-internal-3/article/everything-is-death-by-stephan-heard-6500-words), as well as The Criterion (http://www.the-criterion.com/V3/n2/June2012.pdf) and Sable Mare Tales (http://www.catesbury.com/Sable_Mare5.php). In addition, he is working to build a YouTube channel of him reading his work and talking about art, literature, and philosophy, the channel of which can be found here: http://m.youtube.com/channel/UC33PoxeKqjGNrJoMcqibsfw

Phoenix has an author page on Facebook (Phoenix_Rises), which can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Phoenix_Rises/856569227772482?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Phoenix also has a blog, where he shares excerpts from his work and discusses his most recent ideas. The blog can be found here: https://stephanheard.wordpress.com/

He also has a Goodreads profile that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9868633.Phoenix_

The world of art (even art on the fringe or "unpopular" art) inspires and fuels Phoenix's creativity. He is torn between the riveting and high-profile world of "classics" (which would even include contemporary classics like Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves or James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but obviously gently aged texts like Virgil's Eclogues, Boccaccio's The Decameron, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Tolstoy's War and Peace), and the bildungsroman/coming-of-age genre (such as the infamous but deservedly famous Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger or the Spanish novella Lazarillo de Tormes), though he likes it when either of these categories have a speculative fiction twist. This would include such texts like Dave Eggers and his novel The Wild Things, Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, and Timeskipper by Stefano Benni. He also likes more intense tales like the play Equus, the novel Boy by James Hanley, At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O' Neill, Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, The Notebook by Agota Kristof, and Lord of the Flies by William Golding, among others, liking these texts for their brutal honesty and savage beauty and strength. He deeply appreciates theoretical psychology, such as that by William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, R.D. Laing, Gilles Deleuze, Viktor Frankl, and Joel Gold. He's also a sucker for philosophy (particularly philosophy of mind, such as the work of Richard Rorty or George Berkeley), whether Pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato's Apology, or Aristotle's Metaphysics, or more contemporary texts like that by Montaigne, Descartes, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Foucault. If he was to summarize his field of study, he would say he studies and reads just about anything that sounds interesting, but that he particularly appreciates works that probe the human condition and ask difficult questions about existence.

Currently, Phoenix lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, deeply immersed in art of all colors and shades. He writes full time.

Phoenix's own art is imbued with the necessity of persistence and perseverance, even when the odds are low, even though his art moves from playful and innocent to troubling and shadowy. He believes wholeheartedly, however, that we must rise from the ashes, and must allow our hearts to be vulnerable to the metaphorical daggers all around us. The world is unforgiving, perhaps, but Phoenix hopes to hold onto such concepts as compassion and empathy, even if that means his wings must constantly be aflame and he must constantly be reborn to survive.

In short, Phoenix hopes to continually write with as much integrity, good will, compassion, honesty, and heart as possible, seeking to paint the human condition in vibrant and dark colors, looking for genuine theatrics and casual wordplay, and hoping to inspire all to ask the big questions ... but not to be troubled if they cannot find the answers ...