Cole, David 1941-

views updated

COLE, David 1941-

PERSONAL:

Born 1941; married Deborah Pellow (a professor of cultural anthropology).

ADDRESSES:

Home—Syracuse, NY; Tucson, AZ. Office—NativeWeb, Inc., 16 Cross Rd., Dewitt, NY 13224. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer. Worked as a technical writer and editor and as a teacher of high-school and college English. Founding member, NativeWeb (nonprofit organization).

WRITINGS:

The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective (nonfiction), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1975.

Acting As Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor's Work (nonfiction), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1992.

"LAURA WINSLOW" MYSTERY SERIES

Butterfly Lost, HarperTorch (New York, NY), 2000.

The Killing Maze, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Stalking Moon, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Scorpion Rain, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Dragonfly Bones, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Shadow Play, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Falling Down, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Cole offers insight into the art of acting in his book Acting As Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor's Work. The book presents a theory stating that many of the physical aspects of reading have been lost with time, only to be expressed again in the modern era through acting. "Cole's explication of this model is literate, thorough, and convincing to a point," stated James Peck in TDR. Peck felt that the book was "marred by serious theoretical and historical lapses," but the reviewer nevertheless commended the author's "wide-ranging intelligence and evident erudition." Thomas C. Crochunis, a reviewer for Theatre Journal, found the book lacking insight on the role of gender in his theory, but stated that the author "convincingly shows how both reading and acting can be said to resemble the patterns of psychosocial development that he outlines."

In addition to his scholarly writing, Cole has created a series of novels. His central character is Laura Winslow, a half-Hopi Native American, a former drug abuser, a computer hacker, detective, and a woman who struggles to cope with her anxiety disorder while living on the run. Cole's mysteries featuring Laura focus on many issues meaningful to the Native American community. Laura's first adventures, related in Butterfly Lost, The Killing Maze, and Stalking Moon, were fairly hard-boiled, but as the series evolved, the character softened and became more involved with other people and society in general. On his Web site, the author commented: "My youthful isolation in Michigan's Upper Peninsula tends to push me towards creating characters who are outsiders, caught between enjoying their small-town lives and wanting to be somewhere else. This inevitably colors my writing, so that bright moments are set against a darker side.… The world is both a delight and dark place. At the end of a good mystery, I want a light to shine." He further noted: "My writing has always been politically motivated. Quite frankly, I chose the mystery format because it was a good-selling market, and I could wrap my politics around the plot. And in a very real sense, mysteries are one of the last remaining genres where morality plays a central role."