ALL ABOUT JOE: I was very aware of contradictions as a kid. I was confident but anxiety prone. My family was committed to unity but excruciatingly divided.  Outside the house. I wanted to be somewhere between a jack-of-all-trades and a superhero. Early on, I considered myself smart, popular, funny, tough, and a great athlete, even as I carried anxieties around. By the time I reached high school, that earlier sense of myself was in tatters. Another contradiction—yesterday and today can part company.

At Rutgers, in order to make sense of the world I became a psychology major. This attempt failed. I learned terms and names, theories and hierarchies which created a few aha moments, but these people-theories quickly seemed narrow and simplified. 

Where I had a very different experience was in my Russian Lit class thanks to a Professor Rubchak (who seemed to know the entirety of Western intellectual history) and one of the assigned readings, Crime and Punishment. But it was more Dostoevsky’s writing than the professor’s scholarship that drew me towards becoming a writer. Despite the prof’s best effort to present Dostoevsky as a philosopher (he refused to acknowledge Dostoevsky as a psychologist), it never seemed that way to me. Dostoevsky’s punch was much too heavt. He cut to and into the heart, his writing was vicious and ruthless and tear-jerkingly tender. His characters yelled a lot, and, instead of pulling up at the grotesque punch line, Dostoevsky roared through it.  There is no rational explanation, he said to me. Humans are too messy to live rationally, even when they’d convinced themselves they were doing just that. Corruption, calculation, deception, and betrayal operate through chains of logic but derive from the primitive, not the logical: “Maybe I can’t analyze or explain it, but what I’m telling is the truth.”

Well, I wanted to see if I could drive words to such deep and true places. Even without the ability to explain, I felt I could compose and evoke, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

Send me an email: joecolicchio52@gmail.com