Sheldon Lee Compton is a novelist, short story writer, editor, and columnist. He is the author of three books – the collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), and the novel Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016). In 2012, he was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. The Same Terrible Storm was nominated for the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, while his short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best of the Web, and cited in Best Small Fictions 2015 and Best Small Fictions 2016, guest edited by Robert Olen Butler and Stuart Dybek, respectively. Other writing has appeared in the anthologies Degrees of Elevation: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia (Bottom Dog Press, 2010), Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2015), and Larry Fessenden’s Sudden Storm: A Wendigo Reader (Fiddleblack, 2016). He is the past founder and editor of four literary journals and is currently the founding editor of the online flash fiction journal The Airgonaut.
I’ve held a secret obsession for several years now – a love of film and television that surpasses even my love for reading. As a writer, this outright adoration of the big and small screen alike is sort of my literary black eye. Nonetheless, for every book I read, I binge watch two full seasons of one show or another and watch no less than three movies. This has given me a fairly good palate for the medium. I hope to explore in this column the cultural importance of film and television, how narrative and characterization is flourishing within the art forms, and also add general commentary on some of the most exciting work currently on offer from both. This may be presented as criticism, it may be presented of flattery, but it will always strive to be honest, informed, and relevant.
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