About

 

Who was Aaron John Curtis?

A mixed-race member of the Akwesasne Nation, Turtle Clan- half his mother’s Mohawk Indian (Kanien’kehá:ka) and half his father’s Scotch-Irish.

He was born in Syracuse, NY and attended Syracuse University as a Musical Theater Major when the program was ranked third in the country (he was in a Minorities in Theater group with Taye Diggs and did lights for Vera Farmiga’s one-woman La Vie En Rose). He didn’t want some academic program teaching him about his first loves, writing and art, because he didn’t want to conform. He told himself he chose Musical Theater as a challenge. Little did Aaron realize he was scared.  What if he put actual effort towards learning writing and art techniques, but it turned out he had no talent?

At SU’s Musical Theater program, Aaron couldn’t keep up with the actors, singers, and dancers who had been working on their skills since they were children, and he was booted from the program. He was devastated. Even fooling himself into choosing a major far from his heart, it still hurt to be called a no-talent.

There was a fiscal reality as well. He’d taken a year off after high school, saving money working at Leo & Sons Big M Supermarket and Bonwit Teller. Despite the rumors of free college for Natives, his Native blood was worth $500 a semester. Between the saved money, continued work at the supermarket and the department store, the $500, a small academic scholarship, a job delivering pizzas, and a work-study job as an usher, Aaron managed to pay for two years of college. The money ran out just as he was told he was unfit to perform.

Because he didn’t know what else to do, he kept working at Bonwit Teller during the week and Leo & Sons on weekends. In his downtown apartment that had been a women-only youth hostel a hundred years before, he wrote and painted into the wee hours of the night, filling ashtrays with Camel cigarettes. He also dabbled in sewing, cooking, and creating found art from roadside trash. And drugs. He dropped hundreds of acid tabs. Maybe he ruined what was once a lightning-quick mind, and had to rebuild his brain from the sluggish dregs left to him when the hallucinogens ran dry. Maybe he compressed dozens of years of therapy breakthroughs into a few years of bending the space-time continuum living inside his head. Hard to tell from the distance of decades.

Looking for a job he could leave when he clocked out, Aaron quit everything to become a dishwasher at Bennigan’s. Of course, clean or sober, exhausted or rested, he always prided himself on doing a good job. In two years, against his better judgement, he took twenty-five cent raises to learn every new backroom station and was eventually tapped for the management program. Needless to say, his creative side shriveled.

He moved to Miami in 1997, the year the Marlins won their first world series. Cars and trucks inched along the roads, blaring music. Passengers danced out of sunroofs and in truck beds, banging pots and pans together. For a kid from a staid college town in the northeast, it was one hell of an introduction to the 305.

For the first time in his life, his dark eyes and hair made him blend in rather than stand out. Miami allowed him to find himself in a lot of ways, growing more confident in himself and in his voice. He took classes at FIU and U of M and realized that everything he wanted to explore in life – all the careers and hobbies – could be plumbed through characters he invented.

It was a long, winding road back to the writing life.

 

Who is Aaron John Curtis?

After twenty years as an independent bookseller at Books & Books in Miami (and four years at Borders before that), my debut novel, Old School Indian, is being published by Hillman Grad, Lena Waithe’s imprint of Zando Publishing. It’s an incredible feeling.

I hope to inspire people to continue to create art, despite capitalism’s best efforts to destroy it. Especially art which defies capitalism… even as I want to sell millions of copies and leave retail forever. What can I say? I’m complex.

I hope to support ongoing language revitalization efforts on my family’s reservation, Akwesasne. 

I hope Old School Indian is my first book of many. Thanks for stopping by.

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Selected work

Old School Indian, Lithub – excerpt

Old School Indian

“Cooking for One,” The Selkie – nonfiction essay

Wherein making chili becomes a metaphor for coping with divorce.

Badass: Lip Service, True Stories (The Double Album) – nonfiction essay collection

Includes my essay “We Are More Than These Pale Shells”.

Coral Gables Love – Miami blog collective

Read my book recommendations and book musings.

“World Book Night 2014 – ebook, nonfiction essay collection

World Book Night has been celebrated in the UK since 2011. The US managed to give books away in 2012, 2013, and 2014 before calling it quits. The final year, in addition to free physical copies of books, we gave away free ebooks. The first and last ebook collection for World Book Night included my Florida essay, “It Grows on You.”

final-wbn-ebook-pdfDownload

Lip Service: True Stories Out Loud – videos

A story about a high school friend who had cystic fibrosis.

I was t-boned at 50mph and airlifted to Ryder Trauma Center.

The night out in Miami when I took a tiny step towards accepting my divorce. In shorts.

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