Benjamin Percy
The early decades of the twenty-first century saw a wave of American writers who refused to stay in one lane, moving between literary fiction, genre storytelling, and visual narrative with equal ease. Benjamin Percy, born in Eugene on March 28, 1979, is one of those writers — someone whose career spans prose, screen, and comics in ways that resist easy categorization.
Percy is a citizen of the United States who works in the English language across several distinct but overlapping fields. He pursued his education at Southern Illinois University and later at Brown University, training that placed him inside the broader academic tradition of American creative writing while also equipping him for the more commercial demands of genre work. That combination of literary grounding and genre fluency has defined much of what he's done since.
As a writer and screenwriter, Percy has worked in forms that reach audiences through very different channels — the novel or story collection on one hand, and scripted visual media on the other. His work as a comics writer adds yet another dimension, requiring a distinct skill set that balances economy of language with a close collaboration between word and image. It's a demanding combination, and the range of formats Percy has operated in reflects both versatility and a willingness to engage with storytelling wherever it happens to live.
Beyond his work as a writer and screenwriter, Percy has also worked as a docent, a role that involves guiding and educating others — a function quite different from the solitary labor of putting words on a page. The Library of Congress catalogs his work under the authorized label "Percy, Benjamin," a designation that places him formally within the record of American literary culture. That institutional recognition, modest as it may sound, reflects the breadth of a body of work produced by a writer, screenwriter, comics writer, and educator who has operated across multiple creative and public-facing roles since the start of his career.
Quotes by Benjamin Percy
I want to build as many worlds as possible – each a version of ours with a crack running through it – and not be anchored to any of them.
I grew up on genre – on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.
We wore headlamps and the sight of us bobbing up the hill or zipping perilously down it had the look of busy stars, as if the night sky had come down to join us in our play.
The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can’t quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That’s how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight.
Books are like batteries, he says. And you grow a little stronger by reading them, surrounding yourself with them.
You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.
Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own – and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.
Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.
The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.