UCA creative writing professor and author Mark Spitzer was featured on KUAR, a Little Rock radio station program, on Friday, Oct. 22.

Spitzer’s appearance was in contribution to his book titled “Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West,” a book about the strangest, most misunderstood fish.

“Since the age of six, I’ve been catching and studying the most bizarre, most monstrous fish I could find, and I’ve always marveled at how a lot of people don’t even want to see such plasma-curdling freakazoid creatures,” Spitzer said.

Spitzer’s research surrounding the book involved a lot of reading and hands-on research, with some help from UCA.

“I can say, however, that UCA helped me focus specifically on fish of the American West when I proposed this study as a sabbatical project and it was accepted and supported through research funding,” Spitzer said.

This was not the first time Spitzer has worked with KUAR. He has worked with them twice before and enjoys the narrative aspect the radio show takes for his writing.

“The show’s host has always been enthusiastic about translating my aquatic-monster research into action-packed radio shows that combine music with adventurous narratives that make sense of the plights of hellbender salamanders, gars, eels and other wiggly, squiggly underdog creatures,” Spitzer said.

“More importantly, there’s an audience out there that enjoys learning about what they don’t want to touch, which is important for spreading awareness during a time when our planet is experiencing its sixth mass extinction,” Spitzer said.

Spitzer has written over 20 books, and each one goes through a lengthy process of both research and editing.

“Of course, revision is the main time-consuming process when it comes to these books, and that usually takes a few years. Then comes the editing process in which I work with editors, copy editors, layout editors, marketing and specialists to package the whole enchilada,” Spitzer said.

Spitzer said that sometimes the process is painful but that’s how you get something to the point that it can’t be refuted and you make it as solid as it can be.

“The book that took the most research, though, was a totally different creature altogether. ‘Investigative Creative Writing’ was a much more academic book focused on the teaching of creative writing. I wrote that book for an entirely different audience [teachers, students, program administrators], and it took a lot of effort to not just give up during the revision process,” Spitzer said. 

“My editor was an extremely savvy specialist in the field, and she drove me to revise and 

 and research and re-envision to an extent that I had never done before,” Spitzer said. 

While the books that Spitzer have written vary from novels, to poetry collections, to plays, Spitzer said his favorite to write are the ones regarding fish.

“From here on out, I’m going to stick with what I know best: the grossest, grodiest fish us humans can imagine,” Spitzer said.