Writer-In-Residence / Continued from page 19 and market web pages for clients ranging from a German countess to a national chain of karate schools. Then came what he calls “an early midlife crisis,” and the recognition that he’d originally wanted to be a high school teacher and writer. He’d started an MA in English at Xavier University with plans to someday teach, but in class heard about an opening at Moeller. “Within a few months of deciding again I was going to be a teacher, Moeller had offered me a contract and home for twenty years,” he said. “Let’s say I strongly believe in providence.” Mr. Girard’s first book, Tales of the Jersey Devil—a collection of thirteen original stories based on American folklore—was published the same year he joined Moeller. (The publisher later contracted three more Tales of… books.) Shortly after, an educational publisher hired Girard to write a teen-reader adaptation of The Iliad and he was contracted by the Black Library (Warhammer) to write fantasy novels: “None of the Warhammer books ever actually it to print, but I learned a ton while getting close.” These near-misses pushed him back toward his early love of speculative and fantastic fiction. “I’d started writing fiction for fun by the fourth grade,” he said. “Ripoffs of Lord of the Rings, Sword of Shannara, Mary Stewart’s Merlin series, scribbled into notebooks. It was all fantasy stories—elves, orcs, swords. Then I was on to comic books, and I wrote and drew those. Next came my Stephen King phase. My first ‘novel’ was about a teen who turns into Santa Claus and fights monsters. I’m 26
Moeller High School
old enough that it was typed on an actual typewriter. I entered my high-school writing competition as a freshman and won first prize—a nice hardback thesaurus, which I still have. I suspected, hoped, writing was in the future. It was, alas, another twenty years before anyone ‘rewarded’ me much again for my fiction. Okay, I got third place as a senior, but…”
homelessness, leading workshops in creativity.
Since his return to fiction, Mr. Girard has written and sold more than sixty short stories, appearing in several best-selling anthologies and magazines, including the Stokernominated 2010 anthology Dark Faith, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon. He was also a winner of the 2004 “Writers of the Future” competition, spending a week in Hollywood working beside top authors and earning a slot in the annual anthology. His debut short-story collection, First Communions, was published by Apex Books in 2016.
“People write for different reasons, and in many different forms,” he added. “My aim as writer-inresidence is to help reinforce the skills and fun and power of writing, of the arts. It matters as much now as ever—maybe even more, once robots are doing all our jobs and we’re looking for worthwhile stuff to do with our time and talents. Other teachers promote and teach writing and creativity, but as writerin-residence, that can become my sole focus. To try and get young men interested in sharing words and stories and ideas in whatever form: song, comics, podcasts, film, theatre, editorials—and yeah, even giant epic fantasy novels.”
In high school, Mr. Girard was a freelance journalist for The Cherry Hill Courier covering local sports events. His first play, an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, was produced in 1990. (He is now working on his second.) In 2021, he launched Ellipses Media, which produces content for print, online, theatre, and film, and Ellipses Press, a publishing house for memoirs and social/ political nonfiction. The same year, he founded Tales Of... a quarterly magazine for YA readers, for which he is publisher and editor-in-chief. For five years, he has volunteered at UpSpring, an afterschool program for teens experiencing
“I write because I love to learn and purposely choose projects that offer the chance for me to understand new things. One book had me living in Japan for three weeks. Another had me unexpectedly armed on the US–Mexican border because we were in a cartel-held area,” Mr. Girard remembered.
As writer-in-residence, Mr. Girard has been a guest teacher for Moeller classes including: journalism, art, AP Bio, religion, Moeller’s new Student Run Business, AP Gov, and various English classes. He oversees the Moeller Writing Club, the Squire literary magazine, Project BlueGold-and-Greenlight (a new film competition/program with the AV department), and new school trips to Montana and England built upon immersions into the arts. He hosts a college-essay workshop each fall for seniors needing to tackle the infamous application essays, and