William R. Eakin pretty much began life at three months old, swinging in a hammock on a boat across the International Dateline to Guam and he has never stopped traveling. He went on to live and then to travel in very interesting places like Okinawa, Japan, India, Egypt, Austria, Poland, Germany, England, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, not to mention California, Texas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and on and on. Guided by wonder and awe and a sense of real gratitude for it all, he learned from his father a love for watching sunsets from the eyes of typhoons and from his mom the tender care of family. He retired from teaching philosophy in 2020 and still travels especially to NYC, Chicago and Seattle, where his children make their homes, though he writes on a cliff above the river in Arkansas. And here he has been inspired to do his most published work.
While he has work in some of the best known genre publications in horror, science fiction, fantasy and general lit, he has spent most of his time with what some critics call “a genre all his own,” in his “postmodern, feminist, satirical, and lyrical” Redgunk Tales.—like James Joyce on moonshine, like Thomas Wolfe on acid, writes one reviewer. These stories are set in his own fictitious Redgunk, Mississippi, a place where the genres meet literature and satire, where rural America and the South, junk-filled parts of a state meet absolute beauty and somehow open out to the deepest of human things and real heart. These stories are inspired by the kudzu-covered places where many of his ancestors are buried, the roots of his family, and again by the countryside where he lives and has come to know and love the flaws, brilliance, human-heartedness and magic of everyday people. That with a shake of the weird and spiritual and metaphysical, of the awe and wonder mentioned above, is what drives him to write and teach at all.
Redgunk Tales have appeared in a number of the biggest genre magazines, in five books collecting them and now have been released in toto in a beautiful hard-back compendium from Lethe Press.
A recent critic calls Bill a “digressive maximalist”*. Bill wears that badge with pride. It is a literary term aptly connected with the likes of James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, for Bill, even Herman Melville and Victor Hugo. For Bill it means: including the energy of everything because everything, from the lowest to the highest things, from a pile of trash and junked cars to the wide open sky is– Wow!
The most important thing for Bill is being a Dad. His children call him “Daddy Bill” and his young granddaughter “Granddaddy Bill.” From his son Benjamin and the twins Dylan and Hannah, to Savannah his late wife’s daughter, to Ben’s own daughter Cora, these are amazing people by any count, full of life and humanity and genuine talent. Bill has learned and relearned life watching them grow up and thrive, inspired and renewed by their ingenuity and creativity and the flow of the universe through them. To them he expresses his greatest gratitude. They are what beauty is.
Additionally he is now Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, at the University of the Ozarks where he was employed since 1991, teaching philosophy, religion, creative writing, art history, and humanities and taking students to some of the places mentioned above like Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, and France. He received a Ba. from Hendrix College, Masters from Baylor and from the University of California at Davis, and a PhD from U of A Fayetteville. He also authored essays in philosophy and in literature, and edited books on interreligious dialogue, ecology and feminism. You can’t dip into Redgunk without taking a dive, sometimes just briefly and sometimes very deeply into these dark and light and wonderful things.
Nowadays Bill wanders his clifftop home alone, sometimes with his trusty cat Andy, often with people he loves. He has shared it with his children and with the mother of his children, then with Kody, the high school sweetheart who found him again after 27 years apart, found him, in fact via the first edition of “Redgunk Tales.” From Kody he learned dreams really can come true and that the thing she spoke when she passed away was absolutely true: “It’s sad but not bad.” Easily that’s a theme in Redgunk, with an added Buddhist message: strive on. No, thrive on.
Often now on the hilltop Bill spends his time with wine and friends, with a whole host of great writers who meet around a big rock in his living room and with friends who live in a place not unlike Redgunk and who continue to support and inspire him: John, Julia, Wade, Jill, Ron, Jan, Ardith and, one of the most giving people he knows, Jeannene.