Projects
Blues Stories
I am a blues music fanatic and, as such, am in the process of writing a collection of stories based on blues songs. The aim is for an album size collection.
Here is one story followed by a performance of the song.
Cool Guitars (Song by Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers)
Cowboy Poetry
The poems in this project are based on photographs of myself and my childhood friends in our cowboy outfits, and, in contrast, photographs from The Album of Gunfighters, based on the Rose collection of Western photographs of outlaws and lawmen. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish the book, but it’s a fun hobby like painting by numbers.
Here are a few of my poems that appeared in “Rope & Wire”:
“Turning In Our Six-shooters To The Policeman At the Smithsonian”
Other Writings
Jeff Richards’ fiction, cowboy poetry, and essays have appeared in 30 publications such as Prick of the Spindle, Pinch, New South, Southern Humanities Review, Gargoyle, and The Broadkill Review. He has also appeared in anthologies including Stress City (Paycock Press), Filtered Through Time (Killer Nashville), and Letters to Salinger (The University of Wisconsin Press). His essay “LD” about learning disability appeared both in Tales Out of School (Beacon Press) and the college composition anthology Higher Learning: Reading and Writing About College (Prentice Hall). Richards would one day love to read his poetry at a cowboy poetry gathering because this is the closest he could wish to come to realizing his childhood dream of growing up to be a cowboy.
“I’m Going In” (Short Story), Gargoyle Magazine, Gargoyle Online, #4
“Ne’er-Do-Well” (Short Story), Caveat Lector Vol. 23 No. 1, Winter/Spring 2012