Steve Erickson’s first novel, The Days Between Stations, may have been published in 1985, but it’s still being lauded as one of the best literary debuts of all time. Just this past Wednesday, author Nicholas Royle listed it among his top 10 first novels. The Kingston University MFA program is proud to count Erickson among the illustrious writers who have been part of the MFA Residency Series. In fact, he was one of the first authors to participate and to travel from the US and meet with students.
He edits the American literary journal, Black Clock, which, since its inception in 2004, has featured the writing of such writers as Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Aimee Bender and another MFA Resident, Brian Evenson.
Royle writes of The Days Between Stations:
“I was attracted by the cover; the illustration had a surreal quality reminiscent of Henri Rousseau, which was not not at all misleading. Erickson writes about film and identity, about the New World and the Old, about love and trains and hidden rooms and a bicycle race around Venice. Fall in love with a writer’s first novel, as I did with this, and your relationship with their work is for life.”
Our program director, author Scott Bradfield has long been a fan of Erickson’s work. In 2007, he reviewed Erickson’s novel, Zeroville, writing:
“Steve Erickson is that most unenviable of contemporary American writers––people either don’t read him at all, or they read him too carefully for all the wrong reasons. More often than not, useless and misleading adjectives are applied to his work: “visionary,” for example, or “mythmaking,” or God help us all, even “Pynchonian.” But Erickson isn’t, to his credit, any of these things whatsoever. Rather he is, quite simply, a really absorbing and continuously inventive novelist. He creates unusual characters worth caring about––and he devises original ways of telling about them.”
No Dead White Men 