A01=Michael Dowdy
American Family literature
anxiety disorder
Appalachian literature
Appalachian Studies
Author_Michael Dowdy
being a parent
book on fathering
books about fathers
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Category=DNL
Childhood Studies
childing
Climate Change literature
Creative Nonfiction
Creative Writing
cultural critique
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essays
fatherhood
fatherhood book
Fatherhood literature
fatherhood memoir
fathering
fathers
Flash CNF
Flash Essay
how to raise a child
Literature
lyric essays
memoir
parenthood book
parenthood essays
parenthood memoir
personal essays
raising a daughter in the Anthropocene
Southern literature
Southern Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781496240507
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2025
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
