BILL GEIS, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Welcome to our newest Two Bird team member, Bill! He adds a worldly air to our editing staff and we’re so happy to have him on board. We recently asked him a few questions, here’s what he had to say.
Tell us a little about yourself!
I’m a California boy, lived in Saudi Arabia for seven years, then back to boarding school and college at UC Berkeley. Currently living in Sitges, a little beach town a thirty minute drive down the coast from Barcelona, Spain, with my husband and our pit bull.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
We love to take those proverbial long walks on the beach, popping out for coffee and a bun in the afternoons, and evening mocktails sitting in Judgment Square, the local plaza at the intersection of Gay Street and Gay Alley with four cafés all facing the middle to people watch.
I can’t get enough sci-fi and horror movies, and of course, I love traveling to all the European destinations that are now no more than a few hours away rather than fourteen-plus when we lived in Oakland.
What do you enjoy about helping authors on their publishing journey?
To be simplistic about it, I think of editing as the literary equivalent of a hairdresser. No one cuts their own hair, that would be a nightmare. We do the same thing, but for stories and words: a second pair of eyes to help you realize your vision, see things from behind and different angles, make it sharp, give it volume and shine – it’s all you, looking your best. It’s a great feeling.
Do you have any literary pet peeves?
Two words: James Joyce.
What are some of your favorite authors, and why?
I’m more a fan of individual books than of authors–I won’t generally rush right out and read everything they’ve written because I liked one.
Case in point, Little, Big by John Crowley is a masterpiece of low-fantasy about a family that sees fairies – I’ve read it many times, but I haven’t loved any of his other books in the same way.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf and some of her non-fiction, Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own – I reread them every few years because there’s just so much understated humor, and endlessly complex framing of ideas and sentences. Same with Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia – she only wrote one book, and it is so wry and inventive and sad all at the same time.
I love John Fante’s The Wine of Youth for its portrayal of unmoored boyhood, and Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star for its eeriness.
More recently, I’ve been a reader for the Publisher’s Weekly BookLife Prize and read some outstanding self-published work: Daughters of Green Mountain Gap by Teri M. Brown, and A Tissue of Lies by Mike Nemeth.
Anything else you’d like our authors to know about you?
I write the Substack newsletter “FORD KNOWS” under my pen name, Troy Ford (my birth name, incidentally – I was adopted, and my name was changed) as well as “Qstack,” the LGBTQ+ directory, platform and community newsletter gathering together other queer Substack writers.
Next year I’ll be publishing two books, both in the contemporary queer fiction genre, both coming-of-age novels: Lamb, about two friends from high school through their twenties; and Watrspout, about a troubled party boy who longs to be a fine art painter but gets mixed up in the wrong love triangle.
