Constantine Dhonau Author Bio:
Constantine was born in St. Petersburg, Florida and raised by his mother and his aunt. A wholesome Boy Scout and frontman for Tampa ska/punk band: H1N1, he attended St. Petersburg College for his Associate of Arts and New College of Florida for his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. He escaped to Colorado in 2015 where he served with AmeriCorps and later pursued his dream to become a wilderness therapy field guide, completing 550 field days.
He enjoys writing,
tea, cooking, brooding, dancing, yoga,
astronomy, reprehensibly long walks, movies, being outdoors
etc. & suchforth.
What inspires you to write?
I’m a night writer. I like to wander the deserted streets, imagining I’m the last soul on Earth, rambling on to myself and perhaps the voice memos in my phone. I’ll eventually bring it all back to laying on the floor clickety-clacketing on my laptop.
Tell us about your writing process.
I try to step out of the way. Writing goes best for me when I forget myself. It gets worse when I start having “clever ideas”. I’ll do anything from take voice memos while walking around town at midnight, to writing notes on my phone, scribbling sentences on the back of receipts, to journaling. I’m happy that my approach has evolved over the years and continues to do so. I’d prefer not to have a “formula” to rely on. One of the pieces I’m most proud of recently was a several-month endeavour, the longest I’ve ever taken on a single poem. That one was a scattered collection of creative thoughts and observations while I was a wilderness therapy guide working with at-risk teens & young adults in the Utah desert and Colorado mountains. It also happens to be one of the final poems of “Collateral Intentions”.
Additionally, my journals are open and public. I write in them the same as anyone else would, except I invite and encourage family, friends and strangers to write in them as well. I enjoy capturing life’s raw moments and I see life as a collaboration of relationships, not an individually-informed perspective.
I often write and work on writing projects for days at a time. Eating, drinking, and sleeping very little. It’s somewhat manic, but its a choice and I enjoy it.
For “Collateral Intentions,” I spent a year transcribing 10 journals’-worth of poetry, letters, wrinkled cocktail napkins in a shoebox, milestone journal entries, and phone notes to a google doc (don’t do that), then transferred it over to Mac Pages (don’t do that either), then submitted my eBook to Amazon late (definitely don’t do that), and wrestled with a DOCX for over a year until I finally gave up on the last 5 errors in the printed version.
Who are your favorite authors?
Off the top of my head, I have great respect for Lao Tzu (of the Dao De Jing) and Stephen Mitchell (a translator) for their artistic engineering of words. They both met the task of communicating vast complexity with elegant simplicity. Margaret Cheyney did a remarkable job of adding subtle embellishments to rigorously-researched factual history in “Man Out of Time,” a biography of Nikola Tesla, which made me feel so clearly that I was in the same room with Nikola at times. I’ve never read Stephen King but my hat’s off to him for sheer endurance. Finally, Saul Williams is a seminal inspiration to me. He is an internationally-renowned slam poet and his content, his literary devices, his delivery…ugh…to me, he challenges what it means to read, write, and perform poetry.
What genres do you write?
Poetry, Memoir, Sci-Fi, Dystopian, Fiction, Non-Fiction
How did you choose the genre(s) you write?
My natural niches are existential poetry and dystopian flash fiction. I’ve written a small share of short stories but writing is my mode of personal processing. So, typically, I let the inspiration of what I’m feeling or thinking take me where it wants to, which leads me to a free verse. I’ve had a few attempts at academic writing as well—that fight isn’t over yet, either.
What three things are on your writing desk at any given moment?
A copy of the Dao De Jing, my feet, and a cup of tea.
What hobbies do you have when you need a break from writing?
I take long walks to clear my head and process. I'll talk things out with myself. Sometimes I'll put on a show to turn my brain off for a while.
What formats are your books in?
eBook, Print
Website(s)
Home Page Link
Follow On Amazon
Link to Author Page on Smashwords
Author’s Social Media Links
Goodreads
All information is provided by the author and is presented as it was submitted so you the reader get to hear the author’s own “voice” in their interview.