J.S. CHILDS HAS SPENT HIS LONG, VARIED, AND CURIOUS LIFE making his living with the written word in a hardly credible range of forms. He has seen the bright and the seamy in the literary world as a result of publishing, editing, and writing printed words. He has written magazine ads, marketing flyers, newspaper stories, magazine articles, short stories, poems, technical manuals, scholarly books and essays, novels, speeches, encyclopedia articles, and pretty much anything else someone has paid him (usually very little) to write. All said, what he has lacked in prestige, he has gained in literary variety. He lives in the D.C. area with someone so beautiful and transcendent that no more need be said of her. He has a literary-looking dog and a large, loving, and disturbingly literary family.
YOU HAVE LANDED ON the website of John Steven Childs, where you will find various things he has written, both recently and in the past. There are two free-to-read novels—Dav and Elsewhere—and a blog (Notes for Franz) comprising essays which are, unlike much other bloggle, at least unexpected and literate. Click the icons for either of the novels to find out more about the individual works. Or click the icon for Notes for Franz to keep up-to-date on what I have to say about what is currently happening to us. "Us" means "all of us." You'll find that this site has one overriding policy: We are all in this together. Really. We are.

It will also become quickly apparent to you, beloved reader,that the author of these things is obsessively puzzled about God, history, and love between anybody and anybody else, and takes the frustrations occasioned by this puzzlement out on his keyboard. The result is frequently (I devoutly hope) funny. At the same time, he demonstrates a degree of dissastification about the so-called "answers" we are given about these things by God (to the extent God gives answers), the Muse of History, and not least, other people (who are similarly beset by doubts about him).

If the novels seem vaguely familiar, that's doubtless because their author freely confesses he leans heavily on some of the most popular and beloved literary works known to an increasingly limited number of people, which is to say the Bible (Dav) and the Divine Comedy (Elsewhere). This disrepectful treatment of great literature is exacerbated by my being influenced by an unseemly mixture of Kafka, Sam Beckett, Soren Kierkegaard, and the Marx Brothers.

The blog essays are much the same, except they are more current, more topical, and more disposed to make people on either side of the questions they ask disgruntled.