A Short Biography
Jim Savio is a carpenter by trade, a writer, and a teacher. After twenty-five years of designing, building and renovating homes he received an MA in Creative Writing from CCNY and began teaching at Parsons School of Design and the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York.
His collection of short fiction The Fairy Flag and Other Stories was published in 2001, and his essays and short stories have appeared in literary journals and periodicals. He is currently working on a novel about a healer titled What We Did and a collection of personal essays, Magic Bus.
For the past seven years Jim has taught in the Writing Program at New York University, Abu Dhabi and was affiliated with the Literature and Creative Writing Program there. At NYUAD he also worked in Athletics as a certified hatha yoga instructor, and developed a physical education course that introduced students to yoga tradition and meditation.
In 2014 he began working in film. He co-wrote and directed a hybrid memoir/documentary, Home Sick, with his wife Joanne Savio, and wrote and directed a short narrative film, Tabiib, about a psychotherapist haunted by the stories of his patients. In 2018 he collaborated with two colleagues on another short film, Three Short Tales of Forgiveness that looks at the complexity and necessity of that illusive virtue.
Jim is also a song writer, and a licensed hiking and boating guide in the state of New York.
A Longer Story
I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950. There was no bridge to Staten Island then; the ferry was a nickel. The last three streetcar lines closed when I was six years old. Gasoline was .20 cents a gallon. The plastic bag was still twenty-five years in America’s future. Bottled water wasn’t sold at the local A&P; it wasn’t sold anywhere that I recall. Cell phones were in the minds of novelists and inventors. Televisions were a new commodity in 1950. Their screens were the size of a small lap-top computer and they were housed in ornate, wooden cabinets: living room furniture that provided entertainment. Subway cars had wicker seats and ceiling fans. A three-speed bicycle was coveted. Our rent for a three bedroom apartment was fifty dollars a month. After 11am on a Sunday morning the bakeries under the elevated tracks on 86th St closed, and everything but the restaurants in the neighborhood remained so all day with the exception of a ‘candy store’ here and there.
Mom & Dad 1950
It was an optimistic time. Life was simpler…it only took: two world wars, a near genocide, the invention and use of a bomb, two times, that could potentially destroy life on the planet as we knew it, unchecked industrial and military expansion, and a deep-seated fear of Karl Marx’s thoughts on a more fair and equal society, to get us to that place of sanguinity and candor. We were kidding ourselves to think we were living in Camelot. African Americans in the 1950s had no illusion of that. But this is my story set in the light and the shadow of all that was good and bad midway through the century, on the tipping point of climate change.
