John Dolan (poet)



John Carrol Dolan (born 1955) is an American poet, author and essayist. He currently writes for and co-edits the eXile, an English-language paper founded and formerly based in Moscow, Russia, and now based online in California. He was recently laid off from the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Life
John Dolan was born in Denver, Colorado in 1955. Dolan taught and studied at UC Berkeley, where he completed a Ph.D. thesis on the literary writing of the Marquis de Sade. Dr. Dolan has held various jobs, including attack-dog handler at a truckyard in Oakland. He is the eldest of three brothers.

He has published poems in many US and New Zealand literary journals and his first collection won the Berkeley Poetry Prize in 1988. In 1993, he moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, where he lectured at the University of Otago. During his time in Dunedin, Dolan contributed regularly to the Otago literary journal Deep South. In 2001 Dolan resigned his academic post, and moved to Moscow to become co-editor of the eXile, a bi-weekly English-language publication based there. He was the first reviewer of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a bestseller featured on Oprah's monthly bookclub, to correctly expose this alleged memoir as fraudulent years before that was officially brought to light (the title of Dolan's review was "A Million Pieces of Shit" and the first line was "This is the worst thing I have ever read"). He is married to his former student, Katherine Liddy. Dolan relocated to Canada to teach at the University of Victoria in Canada in 2006. He was fired for encouraging students to criticize George Monbiot in 2008. Until spring 2010, Dolan was an associate professor of English composition and literature at the American University of Iraq - Sulaimani. He was fired in 2010 and wrote a lengthy article on his experience there.

Novels

 * Pleasant Hell (Capricorn Publishing November 2004, ISBN 0-9753970-4-4).

Short fiction

 * Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Dead Cat" and "The Very Moment When The Camera Left Me," Deep South v.2 n.3 (Spring 1996).

Poetry

 * People With Real Lives Don't Need Landscapes (Paul & Co Pub Consortium September 2003, ISBN 1-86940-287-1)
 * Slave (Occident Press, January 1988, ISBN 1-4006-3100-9)
 * Stuck Up : Poems from Great Central Lake (Paul & Co Pub Consortium April 1995, ISBN 1-86940-120-4)
 * "Collage," a poem by Dolan appearing in Double Jointed, a compendium of poems compiled by Jenny Powell-Chalmers (Inkweed Press, Titahi Bay, NZ 2003).
 * "A Couple of Mongols," published the New Zealand literary journal, Sport (v.10 1993).
 * "An Angel Reports to Darwin," Deep South v.1 n.1 (February 1995).
 * "What Happens to a Cyanide Molecule? A Ballet," Deep South v.1 n.2 (May 1995).
 * "HOW I KILLED THE MOUSE," People With Real Lives Don't Need Landscapes).

Translation

 * A Young Scoundrel (Russian: Молодой Негодяй), a novel by Eduard Limonov (to which Dolan wrote a translator's note).

Criticism

 * "Books," a review of The Paris Review Book appearing in New York Press (v.16, n.30).
 * Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Palgrave Macmillan June 2000, ISBN 0-333-73358-4)
 * "Conceived in Sin: The Online Audience and the Case of the eXile," a lecture given May 22, 2004 at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, during an international conference entitled "Dissolving and Emerging Communities - The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age". The title of Dolan's talk was originally listed in the conference's program as "Our Friends From Frolix 8: Offending, Attracting and Ignoring the Reader from Afar."
 * "Attack Ships on Fire off the Shoals of Otago: Arguing about Starship Troopers," Deep South v.4 n.2 (Spring, 1995).
 * "The King's Bow: Review of Rick McGregor's Per Olof Sundman and the Icelandic Sagas," Deep South v.1 n.3 (Spring, 1995).
 * "A Million Pieces of Shit," appearing in eXile May 29, 2003. This was the first review to expose James Frey's memoirs as fraudulent.

Other publications

 * Masculinities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Aotearoa Dunmore Press: Palmerston North (1999). In addition to co-editing with R. Law and H. Campbell, Dolan collaborated on the introduction, one chapter of original material, and an interview. The table of contents is available online.
 * Writing Well, Speaking Clearly, University of Otago Press 1997, ISBN 1-877133-69-8. A textbook.
 * Dolan has acknowledged writing The War Nerd column for The eXile, under the pseudonym Gary Brecher.
 * While this has not been publically acknowledged by Dolan, critical reading reveals that the club reviews of one 'Denis Salnikov', in The Exile, are very probably his own work as well.

Quotations

 * "[I'm] most interested in pathos and the tantalizing possibility of saying something like the truth, if only for destructive purposes."
 * "[People] who squirt impenetrable clouds of ink do so for the same reason squid do."