Todd Michael Cox
Todd Michael Cox was born in the northwoods of Wisconsin, and has been writing for most of his life. Although he's had short pieces published here and there he considers the novel to be his natural medium. His work ranges from comic adventures (like DIZZLEMUCK) to darker studies of death, mourning, and the loss and recapture of innocence in modern day America, along with everything in between (as in new novel WE ARE STRANGE CREATURES). He counts a disparate group of writers as influences, including Wallace Stegner, Hemingway, Harper Lee, Alice Munro, Edward Abbey, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, and Katherine Dunn. The influences of his young and formative years were more along the lines of Bradbury, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and a variety of strange and cheesy movies. Some of this interest still lingers, with traces of fantasy in works like WE ARE STRANGE CREATURES, which deals with kaiju attacking America... though in a far more serious and realistic way than old Godzilla movies.
"Nature's probably my greatest inspiration," Cox says. "Everything I need is found in nature, it compels me to create and care. If you can't find what you're looking for in wild places or the eyes of wild creatures, it probably doesn't exist."
Todd is also a wildlife lover, as well as a musician. His spoken-word project, Ripe For Shaking, has been included on a CD compilation from the Journal of Experimental Fiction called ATTOHO (After They Tore Our Heads Off). See also his TOMICO Bandcamp site (https://tomico.bandcamp.com/) for orchestral, ambient, and experimental pieces, along with other sorts.
His popular Wisconsin Unhuggables blog, originally hosted by Wisconsin Trails magazine but now found on Wordpress, is a collection of his thoughts and perceptions regarding the lesser-loved critters of the world. Todd was a featured guest on the Joy Cardin Show on Wisconsin Public Radio in Spring of 2013 to talk about these critters and his interest in them.
He is the founder of the Snake Anti-Defamation League.
He can be contacted via Twitter at: @TMCwrites
Or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toddmichaelcox
“There's nothing wrong with this. Other than sentimentality, the typewriter offers nothing special to the act of writing. What an author uses to write with is a topic of interest only to children and amatuers, but does not matter in the end. It is quite simply irrelevant; the final product is all that is important. Good riddance to them, I say. However, I do wish I still had mine, if only to use as a wonderful percussion device.--on the Poets and Writers Facebook page, regarding the last typewriter factory closing in India”
“Nature's probably my greatest inspiration. Everything I need is found in nature, it compels me to create and care. If you can't find what you're looking for in wild places or the eyes of wild creatures, it probably doesn't exist.”