Connor Ferguson
What’s your genre?
Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Scriptwriting, Genre Fiction, Memoir, Media Analysis
Are you published?
Indie press publisher
What inspired you to become a writer?
Over the course of my life I’ve been fascinated by the ways stories shape cultural narratives but also our senses of self. At a young age, I found writing to be a particularly powerful form of art, as it allowed me to understand the interior emotional journeys of other people; whether it was fantasy, contemporary fiction, superhero comics, biographies, or poetry, being able to learn about other people’s experiences of life and perspectives on the world helped me to learn about myself. What ultimately inspired me to become a writer, then, was a desire to try to understand myself, and to contribute something to the greater cultural literary conversation which seems so driven by a desire to understand the world.
What author do you admire and how have they inspired your writing?
Virginia Woolf is a writer who has greatly influenced my writing in the last decade or so. Woolf may be most famously known for her Modernist novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, the prototypical novel-in-a-day which focuses on a cast’s mundane activities in the lead up to a party being hosted by the title character. Beautifully written and astute, Woolf’s work in the book contains some of the most brilliant psychological rendering found in the English language, and I would like to accomplish something similar in my own writing. Woolf is also an inspiration due to her genre experimentation: while Modernism was usually placed in contemporary settings, books like “Orlando” pushed at boundaries, utilizing speculative fiction to explore gender and privilege.
Name three of your favorite books and their authors
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
Normal People by Sally Rooney
What’s one thing readers should know about you?
Don’t only write what you know, write what you WANT to know. Being curious about yourself, about others, about the world is where some of the best writing emerges from. While writing can certainly be an informative form of art, so much of writing’s power is in it’s capacity for discovery.
Author Bio
Connor Ferguson is a queer writer born and raised in the Midwest. He graduated from the University of Maine Orono with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing in 2019, and an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing in 2022, and from Iowa State University with an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment. His primary genres are fabulism, lunarpunk, memoir, media analysis, and free-verse poetry; his writing explores themes of queerness, mysticism, the porous boundaries between urban and natural environments, the ecology of the human body, and the ways popular art informs conceptions of identity.
