Author Description

Robert Campbell (1951–2004) liked to call his hometown “Mars Hall” (Marshall, Texas), imagining that it had fallen from Mars. With his boundless talent and eccentric personality, he himself seemed to have descended from another planet. A painter, writer, and musician, he employed the arts as interchangeable mediums to express his inner vision. He called his style “Real Fantasy” to emphasize the fantastic in his take on Fantastic Realism. In 1975, he moved to Los Angeles, and worked as a scenic painter in the theater and film business. His credits include Echo Park (1986), Bagdad Cafe (1987), and music videos for Prince, Kenny Loggins, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, and Nirvana. In music, he envisioned Real Fantasy as a kind of “New Age” rock and roll, and his first poems were the songs he made up while learning guitar in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Humor was an important part of Real Fantasy, and the supernatural and surreal were always encroaching. His late poetry was more introspective, challenging, and gritty. He continued to revel in the power of the imagination, but feared that it “could rob me of reality.” From the incredible worlds he could dream up, it’s easy to see why he never wanted to stop dreaming. EXCERPT: musilyrical as running waters and whimsilyrical as a summer breeze it’s a daring adventure in search of a treasure in search of pleasure, often taking drastic measures over mountaintops, seas, and rainbows stretched over sun-dried meadows, plains of corn, and wheatgrass where scarecrows and long dark shadows hang airing out under the setting sun. — from “What’s Love?,” p. 56 * The Collected Works includes the previously published books Anesthesia Lake (2004), Magic Woman: Rock Songs (2005), Jeremy Black: Short Stories (2005), Audesheer and Deja (2006), and Rut Weaver (2008).