I’m Ed Tankersley.
I moved from Colorado to Arizona in 1980 to attend Arizona State, choosing this school over Cornell and MIT for reasons that are inconceivable to all but an 18-year-old male brain. After wandering through majors in mechanical engineering, photography, and graphic design, I eventually graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in studio art and the equivalent of a minor in art history.
I have worked for the past 20+ years in and around advertising. I started my advertising career as a writer, eventually combining my talents for writing and art to become a creative director. I’ve been a writer, producer and director of commercials and corporate videos, an advertising writer and creative director, voice talent, hand model, website strategist and architect, and online marketer. I’ve won Addy, Telly, Webby, and Swarthout awards (and to the best of my knowledge Brad Pitt has not won any of these).
I launched my website and online marketing consultancy in January 2009, and now spend my days helping businesses get the most out of the Internet.
But really I am a novelist.
I play the guitar, write fiction, watch a lot of movies, search out new music and go to see live bands in small clubs, and play frisbee and ride mountain bikes with my boys.
My reading preference is for novels and short stories. I enjoy novels for their language, dialogue, characters, and story, in that order. In other words, if it’s not well written, I can’t make it through to the end, but if the language is interesting — even challenging — I don’t care if nothing ever happens. Faulkner, Joyce, Pynchon all exemplify my criteria. Recent novels I’ve enjoyed are The Road, Plainsong, The Hours, Underworld, The Corrections, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, All the Pretty Horses, The Privileges, The Things They Carried, Choke.
I turned 51 in early February, an event that was largely overlooked by the mainstream media.