Meet Our Interns: Preston Taylor Stone

We’re so excited to be working with two wonderful and talented interns for the seventh issue of Spry Literary Journal. For the next few months, you can expect to read alternating blog posts from Faith and Preston on Mondays. This first week, we asked them to take a moment to introduce themselves. We’re sure you’ll love our new teammates just as much as we do.

Hello, all! I’m Preston Taylor Stone and I’ll be blogging and interning with Spry in the coming weeks/months. I am an undergraduate student at Clemson University in the small town of Clemson, South Carolina. I’m a double major in Philosophy and English Literature and an aspiring novelist/screenwriter.

As a literature focus in the English major, most of what I study is critical theory, something I’ve come to love immensely. I’ve been most excited about classes I have taking/am going to take here like Ethnic American Lit, Victorian Lit, Romantic Lit, and even a whole class on Milton.

As a general philosophy student, most of what my academic focus will become is ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy.

I consider myself a pretty eclectic person when it comes to most anything: music, art, literature, etc. I’ll read pretty much read/listen to anything in any genre if the right person recommends it to me enough times (and if I have the extra time).

Nonetheless, some of my favorite books and authors are Albert Camus (anything from L’Etranger to Caligula), Toni Morrison (especially a mercy), Gatsby-pen F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned), Ernest Hemingway (The Garden of Eden and Islands in the Stream), Nevil Shute (On the Beach), Mark Z. Danielewski (The Familiar) and the poetry of Milton, Eliot, Plath, Hoagland, Bishop, and Trethewey. So, as you can see, there’s a wide range with slight partiality to Lost Gen./Mid-20^th century and contemporary lit.

Camus is by far my favorite writer of all time. Though he was not very prolific in long fiction (only publishing three novels before his sudden death in a car crash), his philosophical essays, plays, and short stories make up for it. Moreover, every time I explore Camus’ work further, I find myself. The struggle he writes about, between the human need for meaning in a universe that does not offer it, is the conflict in which I stay.

Further, what Camus does with fiction is what I want for my own writing – it’s why I’m a double major. He uses storytelling to get across a philosophical point and neither part suffers for the other’s triumph. At every turn, Meursault is an absurdist and at every turn, his story is still just as riveting. This fictionalized philosophical essay is what I most love about Camus.

As far as my writing goes, I am finishing up my first novel under the working title flowers with no petals, which is a coming-of-age novel about a girl who’s moved to Italy to live with her grandmother after her parents’ divorce and the writer who’s penning her tale.

I am also writing poetry when I can and I’m hoping the first collection can survive as The Confessions of an Early-Twenties Melancholic Sonuvabitch or something of the like. If I had to describe my writing, I’d say it has this matter-of-fact sardonic voice coupled with darker tones and subjects, which is ultimately my attempt at presenting the life-and-death feelings of the young adult voice and commenting on that with Lost Generation idealism-is-dead sarcasm. And I’d say critically speaking I’m partial to meta-modernism and post-modernism.

P.T. Stone is a student at Clemson University studying English and Philosophy. He is an avid writer of poetry and prose, a composer, a frequent Facebook ranter, and a pure-bred digital generation brat. He is finishing his first novel, flowers with no petals, and has literary blogs here and here. When he isn’t trying to become famous writing, acting, or singing, Preston can be found chasing fluffy kitties to use as pillows while they purr or Instagram stalking Lady Gaga.