Bryce Milligan

Aug 3rd, 2010 | By Sean Ward | Category: Featured Artist

Bryce Milligan

Born in Dallas, Texas, Bryce Milligan has lived in San Antonio since 1977. Among other things, he has been a folksinger, a maker of guitars, drums and dulcimers, a carpenter, a rare book bibliographer and appraiser, a college English and creative writing instructor, a poet-in-the-schools, an arts administrator, a book and magazine editor, a book designer, and a publisher. As a writer, he has been a newspaper columnist, a freelance journalist, a scholar, a novelist, a poet, a playwright, and an essayist.

Milligan is the author of five historical novels and short story collections for young adults, including the award-winning With the Wind, Kevin Dolan (Corona Publishing, 1987), which was republished in Germany.

He is also the author of six collections of poetry. In The Texas Observer, critic A. E. Mares compared Working the Stone to the poems of Seamus Heaney and Donald Hall. Milligan is also the author of five locally produced plays and well over 1,500 articles, essays, and reviews.

Milligan is currently working on a series of novels about the world’s first known writer, Enheduanna of Ur (2300 BC), a task that has required him to become intimate with ancient Sumerian. Next spring he will release a CD of his songs, prior to being the “distinguished guest writer” at the 2011 Prague Summer Writing Workshops, which will focus on poetry and music.

In His Own Words

I cannot remember any time in my life when I was not writing something. I must have begun writing about the time I learned to read. At least I remember putting my own lyrics to the songs that were on the radio when I was very young. I must have been born a Romantic, as I’ve written “love songs” my whole life, although my poetry generally is a bit more austere.

The first poem I remember writing that struck me as being a “real” poem was in seventh grade. We’d moved from a house with lots of lovely trees to one that had no trees, so I used to climb up on the roof to think and write. I’d gotten interested in Latin and in Roman history, so I wrote this poem about a centurion at Hadrian’s Wall who had just been recalled. He was pondering the end of the empire. Odd poem for a seventh grade kid, but I was fascinated by Ezra Pound’s Cantos — full of history that I had little understanding of — and I think I was emulating him.

By the time I was in high school, I was helping produce anti-war poetry leaflets, by means of an appropriated mimeograph machine. So putting the words of other people out there in the world started early. I remember reading something by Sam Johnson, who said that “booksellers are generous, liberal-minded men, the true patrons of literature.” Well, I wanted to be one of those, so I had jobs working in both trade and rare bookstores. But selling books – actually running a bookstore – as lovely an illusion as that may be to many writers – is a difficult, very time-consuming job that leaves too little time to actually read and write.

No great writer ever existed who was not an omnivorous reader. So, reading manuscripts, editing other writers, all of it most certainly feeds me as a writer. And when words get to be a little overwhelming, I can always play music, or make an instrument, or carve a stone, or climb a mountain. The world is full of things to do that feed one’s imagination and creativity.

Loose Ends – A Song by Bryce Milligan

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A Recent Poem

Waiting for the Tow

The day is severed:
planned from the unplanned,
necessary from
necessary now.

The ripple runs through
bumping meeting times,
edging off center
the events that were

anticipated
so finely balanced
that some small loose screw
has set all askew.

Additional Background

Milligan holds a M.A. in language and linguistics (Anglo-Saxon and Old Irish) from the University of Texas at Austin.

He has written extensively about Latino/Latina literature. Milligan is the primary editor (co-editors are Angela de Hoyos and Mary Guerrero Milligan) of the anthology Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (Putnam/Riverhead, 1995, paper 1996). He is also one of the editors of a CD Rom, American Journeys: The Hispanic American Experience (Primary Source Media, 1995). A second major anthology, ¡Floricanto Sí!- U.S. Latina Poetry, was published in the fall of 1997 by Penguin USA.

The founding editor of Pax: A Journal for Peace through Culture (1983-1987) and Vortex: A Critical Review (1986-1990), he became in 1995 the publisher/editor of Wings Press, one of the oldest continually operating small presses in Texas.

Milligan was the book critic for the San Antonio Express News from 1982 to 1987, and for the San Antonio Light from 1987 to 1990. He has taught English literature and composition, creative writing, and education courses at the University of Texas at San Antonio and at Palo Alto College. For three years he worked with the San Antonio ISD as a poet-in-the-schools.

In 1985, Milligan co-founded (with Sandra Cisneros) an event which evolved into the San Antonio Inter-American Bookfair. Until 2001, Milligan was the director of the literature program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. Activities directed by Milligan include the biennial “Hijas del Quinto Sol: Studies in Latina Identity” conference (co-hosted by St. Mary’s University), the annual San Antonio Inter-American Bookfair and Literary Festival, the Lumbre reading series, a series of Summer Master’s Classes in creative writing, various community outreach classes in creative writing and Latino literature, and an annual PBS-televised poetry slam for young adults.

Milligan and his wife of 35 years, short story writer and librarian Mary Guerrero Milligan, live in a 110-year-old house in downtown San Antonio with their two children, three cats, and 15,000 books.