About
Marty Smith was born a certain number of years ago in Peoria, Illinois. Some sixteen years later, he graduated from an undistinguished Midwestern high school and matriculated, if that's the word he wants, at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
At Reed, Smith took a shitload of drugs, grew two inches, and began to shave, in roughly that order. During this period, he also began contributing articles to the Reed College Quest. These articles were primarily complaints about the insufficient supply of beer at campus parties.
Dissatisfied with Reed's policy of expelling him, he enrolled at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he drank a shitload of whiskey, started to go bald, and won the Maya Deren Prize for Best Senior Thesis in Film, in roughly that order.
Returning to Portland for no particular reason, Smith became a regular contributor to Portland's alternative newsweekly, Willamette Week, where he seems to remember having won some sort of award for something or other. At least two of his Willamette Week articles were subsequently reprinted in what was then known as The Utne Reader, now simply Utne.
Concurrently with his tenure at Willamette Week, Smith was a member of the chronically sub-famous shoegazer band Swoon 23, whose two CDs, 1995's Famous Swan Song and 1997's The Legendary Ether Pony, were generally well-received by the press and largely unnoticed by the record-buying public.
Smith devoted the calendar years 1998 to 2002 inclusive to failing in business. His enthusiasm for the internet as a career option has since waned markedly.
In 2002, Smith contributed a regular column, hideously named The Ask Master, to the Seattle Weekly. This not wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs continued until The Day Everyone At The Seattle Weekly Got Fired.
Smith now spends his time drinking a shitload of Diet Vanilla Coke, working at his menial, demeaning job, and attempting to write something at least marginally worthwhile. His collection of essays, What the Hell Is Wrong With Me? will be published next year if he has to do it himself.
my links
Seattle Weekly columns
published work
(finally adding these)
...and more stuff when I type it
drafts, etc.
Even a Hunchback Can Use Bubble Wrap
offsite links