Steven Argyle
Also known as Sean Robert Gyll, Esq.
Also known in Piratical circles as 'Sandy Robb' Gyll
 |
Poetry
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Essays
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Stories
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Non-Fiction
|
Steve writes:
Dale once noted that I am a storyteller who wishes he were a writer and that he is a writer who wishes he were a storyteller. Now, Dale is an unusually perceptive and deeply thoughtful man; I believe he never had a more penetrating insight than this characterization of the two of us.
I am, by nature, an incurable dilettante. My interests range as broadly as the world is wide. I have sipped at countless wells, but have drunk deeply at relatively few. I have just enough knowledge to hold an intelligent conversation on a myriad of topics, but I am truly master of none. I have a retentive memory for historical and literary trivia that borders on the autistic savant in nature, yet I am functionally innumerate and have difficulty remembering my own telephone number. When I was a young father of two unruly boys, a doctor told me that I was a classic Attention Deficit Disorder case. Well, that diagnosis may explain a few things, but it changes nothing.
My brain has never been idle, and imaginative daydreaming has dominated its activity for as long as I can remember. There is more than a trace of Walter Mitty in my psyche. Some of my earliest memories are of the childish stories my four- or five-year-old brain concocted to fill my days. I literally almost never stop thinking about stories. For a season in adolescence, I shared my stories verbally on long walks or lazy afternoons in the Dart Room with a few choice friends. It was in these days that my lifelong friendship with Dale began. As I entered college and grew too timid, or too “mature” to share these pages of my soul in free-form, I made a feeble effort to write one of the stories down. The House of Jacob was the result.
In later life, I have dabbled in community theatre and have gained something of a reputation as a professional storyteller. But when I perform for the public, it is always someone else’s stories that I tell. True to my nature, I have never yet made a disciplined effort to write the stories I’ve dreamed. One will come out every five or ten years, but I never can seem to sustain the effort to polish, refine, and publish the stories once they make it to paper. That is something that writers do.
The ironic thing is that I have spent most of my career as a technical writer, a little gray man in a little gray cubicle generating reams upon reams of worthless technical drivel and general anesthetic made from wood pulp and ink. I suppose it’s only poetic justice.