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Writer Greg Bottomss current work-in-progress began in single words loss, memory, God, stories, endings jotted as his car idled on the gravel shoulder of a Virginia road in 2001. The literary pit stop was inspired by a radio news report on the death of outsider artist Howard Finster, who had first come to Bottomss attention some fourteen years before when he and a group of buddies road-tripped to see a film documentary about the Athens, Georgia scene. Bottoms and his friends were drawn to the film by its focus on the rock band R.E.M., but came away with the CrackerJack special prize in Finster, a sure bet to intrigue a pack of teenage boys given his eccentricity and outsiderness.

Literary inspiration and its unpredictable gestation period are often mysteries even to a writer himself. In the finished piece that began on that interrupted drive to work in 2001, Bottoms would write: Id had Finster in the back of my mind for years, that ideas of outsider art and institutional art (as Arthur Danto famously called it), conformity and nonconformity, madness and ecstasy, the jagged edges of society, had, for reasons as much personal as intellectual, as much cathartic as aesthetic, become my central preoccupations, my tape-loop of concerns, my recyclable themes.

The tape loop of concerns traces to Bottoms childhood in a household struggling to cope with his older brother Michaels paranoid schizophrenia. That deeply personal story would find expression in Bottomss book Angelhead: My Brothers Descent Into Madness, a memoir in which the writer would begin to find his voice, his themes, and his own genre-blurring style of creative non-fiction.

Madness, jagged edges over a cup of coffee at Waterman, the first-year member of the English faculty doesnt strike you as one preoccupied with staring into the darkness. Greg Bottoms is a happily married father with two young kids. He looks like hed be comfortable on a snowboard, and he is. Hes thrilled to be in Burlington, making a living teaching and writing. Still, when he reels off his list of his new homes attractions the local political ethos to the lake views, he cant help but include a jagged edge. That certain lingering New England mill town grit ranks high among Burlingtons intrigues, he says.

Lifting the mask
A funny thing happened to Bottoms after he received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Virginia: he essentially stopped writing fiction. Increasingly, he was drawn to a non-fiction voice and, in a Virginia farmhouse, he began to write the memoir that would develop into Angelhead.

It started to seem forced to me to stand behind a fictional mask, Bottoms says, because it was really just me trying to tell the truth anyway. I started to feel much more comfortable, just saying, This is Greg talking on subject X.

In a practical sense, Bottoms also quickly found publication and acclaim with that approach. When the memoir was published to positive critical notice, all of a sudden I was a creative non-fiction writer, Bottoms says.

The book began in an attempt to understand his brothers troubled life. I began to think I understood the rationale, religious obsession of schizophrenia, being disconnected from the world and life and other people because youre sick, Bottoms says. In some ways that is a universal experience for every human being at some point in their life. His was just so extreme.

That preoccupation has continued long after Angelhead was published. Bottoms is under contract with the University of Chicago Press for a book that will look at a number of American visionary artists, many of whom are similar to Howard Finster in that they are motivated by religious ecstasy or mental illness your call. Finster, for instance, read a paint splotch on his finger as a divine message to create sacred art. He did, spectacularly, across acres of gardens, in building-size works of art/testaments of faith, 46,000 works in 25 years. Bottoms originally explored Finster in a piece titled Visions from Paradise in Oxford American.

Inspired or crazed? As Bottoms delves into the artists, their work, and their region in his own style of personal narrative, he doesnt see such judgment as being part of the work. Im the documentarian. Im not out to judge them, belittle them, or mystify them as the wisdom of the common man. Im much more interested in the realism. Truly, what is their situation, and what is it that theyre doing?

Nuts and bolts
Though there are the obvious challenges to balancing teaching, family life, and a writing career on the rise, Bottoms says he welcomes the demands of a schedule. He says he does his best work when the world is knocking at his door. Recalling a time when he had full days to write, Bottoms laughs at the memory. The more I had time to do whatever I wanted, walk around in my slippers all day and drink coffee with my hair standing up, I just did nothing. It was terrible. Structure may not be romantic, but it is a good thing.

Bottoms emphasizes structure in his teaching, too, defining himself as something of a formalist in the classroom, a real nuts and bolts craft kind of teacher. He has seen students grind to a halt or produce sub-par work if theyre given an assignment with few barriers.

Also key to his teaching is helping students to read well and closely to find the underlying structure in a powerful piece of writing. I cant make anybody an artist, cant make them a great writer, Bottoms says, but I can impart to them a better understanding of craft and technique and a way to read as I think writers have to read to continue to get better. Then its up to them.

And, like most good teachers, Bottoms admits that hes learning every day as a writer in search of new ways to tell a story, and continually striving to create an honest, human, humane voice. Its never easy and perhaps gets harder the more you know, Bottoms suggests. As an undergraduate, I could write a paper quickly, and really I thought I was a genius. It has become a lot slower process as Ive become aware of all the ways writing can go wrong, he says. Now, I may write something and think it is one of the best things Ive done, then at the same time, Ill think, This sucks. This is just not it.

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