Today we’d like to introduce you to Bruce Craven.
Hi Bruce, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in the early Eighties, then received my MFA in poetry from Columbia University in the mid-Eighties and, while working for Columbia Business School, wrote a novel about a road-trip from LA to Palm Springs that was published in 1994 and translated into Japanese and German. The novel “Fast Sofa” was turned into a feature film starring Jennifer Tilley. During that time, I worked as a bartender in NYC and then returned to executive education work and moved back and forth from L.A. and N.Y.C., writing and working for Columbia Business School. I lived at different times on the Westside, playing basketball on the Venice courts, then in Hollywood, Burbank and Monrovia, about fifteen years ago, my wife and infant son and I moved to the Palm Springs area, and I kept commuting to NYC to teach at Columbia Business School. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve taught global senior executives in leadership, as well as teaching MBAs and Executive MBAs, a class called “Leadership through Fiction”. In 2019, McMillan published my non-fiction book “Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones”, that has since been translated into Serbian, Turkish and Russian. In 2019, Red Dirt Press in Oklahoma published my poetry collection “Buena Suerte in Red Glitter”. In 2020, my wife, Sherelle Craven, and I launched our leadership consulting company: Craven Leadership. This summer, 2021, Codhill Press in New Paltz, New York published my novel about NYC in the Nineties: “Sweet Ride”.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I can’t imagine that any writer who seriously pursues their vision in fiction projects finds the road smooth! In the last 25 years, I have faced many situations where film and fiction projects were on the verge of being produced and published and then slipped away in a moment, leaving me broke and hustling. I don’t think that’s a unique thing that’s happened to me…that’s just what can and will usually happen to writers. In the early Nineties, I was living in Hollywood, and down in my last couple bucks, living in a nice rented bungalow in the hills. (My manager was being very lax about collecting rent towards the end…) Going into the Thanksgiving weekend, I had a novel in NYC and a film in L.A. that both looked ready to happen…and both collapsed on the same Tuesday morning. Again, nothing new about that kind of thing. The most critical skill for a writer is to build resilience.
A few years after that, I had a new novel making the rounds with a big agent, but the agent couldn’t get an offer and gave up…around that time, a novel I had submitted to a contest for publication was selected as one of the co-winners, but the judge wouldn’t select either book, as he/she apparently didn’t like either book, so neither was published. I remember thinking, “Can’t you just do rock-paper-scissors and get ONE of our books published?” Part of resilience is to fight the tendency to fall into victim mode and believe that the world is set against your success. Negativity is a killer. I know I fell into that at times, but have worked hard to be proactive and just keep fighting for the projects that matter to me.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I have worked simultaneously as a creative writer and as an educator in business leadership. I have benefitted from learning about leadership from amazing professors and students. When organic and appropriate, I’ve woven this knowledge into my fiction projects. In the film “Fast Sofa”, Crispin Glover plays a lonely, virginal ornithologist and there is a scene where he’s trying to liberate a hawk from a badly run pet-store. He paraphrases the late, famous management consultant Peter Drucker’s point about the importance of doing the right things, not doing the wrong things with great efficiency. My leadership book on Game of Thrones was a powerful opportunity to weave George RR Martin’s fictional characters together with leadership wisdom that I have taught to graduate students and executives and that, in many cases, I have learned from world-class professors and also applied to my own life. My new novel, “Sweet Ride”, is set in the Nineties and very loosely based on time when I was a bartender in NYC. The characters are all facing moments in their lives where their dreams are smashing up against the ugliness of reality, and they are needing to decide if they can choose to lead themselves forward in a productive way that is true and that will fulfill them. It’s a romantic, edgy novel with a lot of wild behavior, and it’s very much around making the choice to be resilient. In my leadership consultant work, I have a number of sessions where I bring fiction in as a tool to help people build their individual adaptability and effectiveness in leading themselves and others.
What’s next?
I have been working with L.A. based actor/director Max Martini on a feature film script set in the world of rodeo, and also on a TV drama set during the Civil War: “Freedom Road”; both projects are edgy, tuned into current issues and intense. I have also been working with the L.A. based team at Victory & Noble — Patrick Howell & Tori Reid — on a leadership book based on biographical poems about famous outsiders, linking the poems to leadership development ideas, much like what I did with the GOT book. The working title: “Leadership Outlaws”.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.cravenleadership.com
- Instagram: @ledsofa
- Twitter: @ledsofa
Image Credits:
Mark Shaw
