Tell Me About Your Bad Guys

Fathering in Anxious Times

Michael Dowdy (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

218 Seiten

2025
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-4050-7 (ISBN)

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Michael Dowdy perceives the world as a poet, one with an anxiety disorder. As a result he has rarely experienced fathering or his relationship with his daughter, A, as a linear narrative. Rather, his impressions of fathering coalesce in encounters with the conditions of our time, producing intense flashes of awareness and emotion. Critiquing his own fathering practices, Dowdy’s essays move between simplicity-being present for his daughter-and complexity-considering the harrowing present of entrenched misogyny, school shootings, climate change, and other threats to childing and fathering with love, optimism, and joy.

The essays in Tell Me about Your Bad Guys do not provide easy answers. They follow instead an interrogative mode, guided by A’s unruly questions and Dowdy’s desire to avoid fatherhood literature’s traps: false modesty, antic ineptitude, and defensive clowning. This means understanding fathering not as an ironclad identity or a cohesive story but as a process of trial and error, self-reflection, and radical openness. With measures of dark humor, the essays take seriously the literary, material, and political stakes of fathering and in doing so challenge patriarchal norms and one-dimensional accounts of fatherhood.

Michael Dowdy is a professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Urbilly: Poems and American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement , co-edited with Claudia Rankine.

List of Illustrations
Preface: Dad Selfies

1
In the Forginning
South Padre Island
[Precario]
The Night after Newtown
Living’s Tons
[Stuffy]

2
My Nouns
My Bitter Beer Face
[Ark]
Grrrl Dad
[Monopoly]
Receiver of Wreck

3
Mountainsickness
[Back Seat]
Rappalachia 911
[Port]
Tiny Towns
[Cliché]

4
[Escaped Time]
Matilda the Trail Fairy
[Vicuña]
The Stranger’s Banquet
[Marquee]
The Scope of My Vigilance

5
My Commonplace Book
Swifties [Redacted]
[Shelter]
To-Go Mining
What We Take from the Anne Frank House
[Hovercraft]

Coda
Elementary Primer

Acknowledgments

Erscheinungsdatum	17.01.2025
Reihe/Serie	American Lives
Zusatzinfo	2 photographs, 6 illustrations
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	140 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
ISBN-10	1-4962-4050-2 / 1496240502
ISBN-13	978-1-4962-4050-7 / 9781496240507
Zustand	Neuware