New site:


This website has not been updated for quite some time, to see more recent stuff please visit my Blog.

The Obscurity Symposium


Bio


My name is Zach Smith, I currently live with my wife in West Chester Pennsylvania. I am a graduate of Chestnut Hill College with a Bachelors Degree in Political Science. When I was a kid I lived in Egypt and Indonesia.


I have been writing for about ten years. I write both Genre and Literary Fiction, as well as the occasional Play and Poem. My writing is usually a symbolic interpretation of or a response to specific social issues, reconstituted as a story, which you may or may not, but hopefully will, find interesting and entertaining.


When I was nine years old I was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. School was not at all easy for me. Reading was almost impossible for me to do up until the end of High School. Spelling, as you may have noticed already is still difficult. Because of my difficulties in reading I developed a great respect for the short story. I could read a short story when my friends were reading novels, and I could feel like I accomplished something. This is why I write and I am attempting to make a career out of writing short stories. My disability has hindered me in my creative endeavors, but has also given me the drive and inspiration to work harder to succeed as a writer.


I hope you enjoy my website.


On Postmodernism:


Although difficult to truly define, the essence of postmodernism, for me anyways, is the belief in and ongoing response to the idea that there is only a finite amount of art that can be created, and the modern era has marked the reaching of this finality. There are only so many stories that can be told, songs that can sung, only so many ways to look at the world, and anything that is "new" has already been plagiarized.  In order to create the postmodernist must alter fundamental principles and work from there out in order to generate wholly new material. The effect of which makes for very different and unexpected creations, but the side effect of which can and usually does result in antipathy from the common mass leading to the equation that the newer and more postmodern a creation becomes the field of those who appreciate it narrows in an inverse proportion.

  

Email: zachhsmith23@gmail.com