Wyrd Words

About the Author

Dr. Timothy Fox Writing as Grandfather Hu was never a real person, but that didn’t matter to the listeners who heard him over the airwaves in Taiwan. For them, Grandfather Hu—the host of the FM radio station’s weekly English-teaching program, broadcasting throughout Yilan County—was just another befuddled American expat. In this respect, at least, Grandfather Hu appropriately mirrored Dr. Timothy Fox, the National Yilan University professor who wrote and voiced the fictional traveller into being. Eventually, the cooperative endeavour between the radio station and the university came to an end, and Grandfather Hu was set aside as a pleasant memory. After an extended illness, Dr. Fox retired from academia. As a naturalized citizen of Taiwan (ROC), he wasn’t going anywhere, and before long, he felt the drive to expand his experiences as a writer and teacher. When the exhilarating invitation to submit a regular column about the Horror Genre came along, he couldn’t resist getting back into lecture mode. But while you can get the teacher out of academia, it is somewhat more difficult to get academia out of the teacher. And so, Grandfather Hu was resurrected as a fictional alter ego who had already been endowed with a tried and tested personality. Grandfather Hu could soften the sharp edges of academic writing styles while expressing a vision of the world as overflowing with weirdness, a place where speculative writing belonged. The genesis of that sensibility was the happenstance of growing up in an almost liminal American space, a borderland where communities defined by race, national origin, culture, and class came together during a period of tremendous nationwide societal changes. The weirdness of that adolescent journey is inseparable from the experience of being a consumer and a critic of speculative storytelling. Contrary to what Hamlet said in closing, what remains is not silence, but words. Wyrd words.