Interview 77- Navy Veteran, Author, Bill Cushing
- Interview 77- Navy Veteran, Author, Bill Cushing Bryan Roof 1:08:35
Bill Cushing enlisted in the Navy where he was assigned to electrician’s school before joining the fleet. He returned to college later only to drop out. As a result, He spent about 16 years drifting between numerous jobs (bartender, cabbie, retail sales, truck driver) with the bulk of his work life continuing as a shipyard electrician—mostly on oil tankers. Then, a series of work-related accidents and the coaxing of a good friend convinced him to try completing his academic coursework one more time. He began at a community college in Jacksonville, Florida intending to major in history but met an English instructor who roped him back into his interest in writing, so by the time he entered the University of Central Florida, he focused on American and modern literature but also took enough creative writing classes to declare a double major in English. After moving to Puerto Rico with his wife (then girlfriend), he began work on his MFA at Goddard College in Vermont. He intended to write a novel based on the Norwegian folk tale of Peer Gynt using the backdrop of his years as a “yard bird,” but after only three months of marriage, his wife died, so he took a semester off, returning with an entirely new project in mind—the memoir of her, their relationship, and the effect that Cancer had on them. Go check out his work on mywriter.net and his newest Non-Fiction book “Heroic Brothers of the Civil War.”
