Christopher Bernard

I grew up near the Atlantic seaboard and in the farm country of eastern Pennsylvania and the high deserts of Mexico, immersing myself in Russian fiction, English poetry, and the music of Wagner, Beethoven, and Bruckner. I soon began writing my own stories, poems, plays, novels, essays, etc. (and even spent several years composing "classical music") and by my early twenties was publishing poetry and journalism and giving poetry readings in the Philadelphia area, where I lived at the time.

In the early 1970s I won the Temple University Student Poetry contest. In the late 1970s I came to California to escape “family, friends, and Philadelphia,” and have lived in San Francisco ever since. My essays, criticism, experimental fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and periodicals in the United States and Great Britain. My poem “Nymphéas,” published in Ekphrasis, a small poetry magazine in Sacramento, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

My poems and fiction have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies throughout the United States. Several of my plays have been produced and radio broadcast in the Bay Area; also an excerpt from Nachtstück, an opera for which I wrote both libretto and music. In 1989, I helped found the literary and arts magazine Caveat Lector which, with Ho Lin, I continue to edit and publish. My novel A Spy in the Ruins was published in 2005 by Regent Press, and is available at www.regentpress.net or at Amazon.com. I have completed a second novel, called Voyage to a Phantom City, and a third Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars' Cafe, both published by Regent Press. Two poetry collections, The Rose Shipwreck and Chien Lunatique, appeared in 2013 and 2017. I have also published two collections of short fiction. My blog, “The Bog of St. Philinte" [pronounced feeLANTE], can be visited and commented upon. (http://theelitist-cwb.blogspot.com/)

It may be strange to say this, but I have to admit I often feel myself to be culturally and intellectually less an "American" than a "European," if eccentrically so, shipwrecked on the coast of the brave new world. My work sometimes has more in common with continental than with American traditions, especially in its formal curiosity and philosophical speculations and skepticism regarding popular culture, literary realism, and literary fantasy. I find myself often doubting commonly honored American values, democratic culture, the religions of the book, etc. If there is any salvation, I believe it is through the delicacy of fantasy, the reverie that vanishes in its realization, the vertigo of the moment’s adoration and the convivial grace of the hallucinations called art.