My name is Scott Pearce. I while away the hours as a writer, teacher, fabulist, and fantasist. Here you can find information about me, my novels, my photographs, and my meanderings.
Authorly pose. Resting my chin on my right hand and wearing a shirt my mother made.
I am from Mooroolbark, Victoria and live in the Yarra Valley. I enjoy early morning running sessions in the darkness, creating new reasons to never cut the lawn, professional wrestling, and writing.
Here I am demonstrating my ability to rest my chin on my left hand. Versatility is important.
The Rider on The Bridge
MidnightSun Publishing: 2022
In late Autumn, Kitten, so named by a girl he met long ago, sits and remembers a painful adolescence, not of lost love and romance, but of wild and unbound joys and sorrows. And always a perpetual feeling that all of it will one day come back just as it was.
Reviews
‘Scott Pearce’s second novel achieves a decaying, dreamlike lyricism and is written – from within the fickle labyrinth of memory – about life lived on the margins of society… The Rider on the Bridge has metafictional qualities – stories tall and true offer fleeting refuge from a harsh world – and the narrative slips into the uncanny. It’s a disorienting novel shaped by pervasive rootlessness, with a sense of belonging grasped for a time in the solidarity of poverty and the camaraderie of misspent youth.’ —The Saturday Age, Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Brisbane Times.
‘Scott Pearce has crafted a book full of lyricism and realism which will frequently take your breath away – either by the beauty of the language or the harshness of Kitten’s milieu. There is an authenticity in the lived experiences of Kitten and his cohorts; and for anyone who has worked closely with disadvantaged youth, there is much to be recognised in and much to be learned from the story of Kitten. It is a story to be savoured and reflected on – and to reassure ourselves that, even in the harshest of times, there are moments of sheer pleasure.’— Rod McLary, Queensland Reviewers Collective.
‘Rider provides an intriguing glimpse into life on the edge of society, a shadow world that most would walk past every day without noticing. Yet this is a world of real people, real suffering, and real consequences that will follow Kitten into later life, long after his adolescence is over.’ — Sally Nimon, The Newtown Review of Books.
‘The Rider on the Bridge is an unforgettable portrait of a group of abused or disabused youths, surviving in solidarity, sustained by dreams. Balancing realism and lyricism, brutality and hope, this is a profoundly humane and thought-provoking work. With this second novel, Scott Pearce announces himself as a writer who demands our attention.’ — Maria Takolander.
'A gritty, realistic portrayal of a young boy forced to grow up quickly, The Rider on the Bridge creates its urban underworld in lyrical and evocative language. The novel draws the reader along in a fast-paced narrative, showing us the beauty and the precarity of life lived on the "other" side.’— Rachel Hennessy.
Faded Yellow By The Winter
Reading Sideways Press: 2019.
Faded Yellow By The Winter explores the tensions that arise in the farming town of Henrithvale: a small, but once prosperous town of north western Victoria. The novel’s lead character, Vic, struggles in his bids to save the footy club, his family’s inter-generational apple orchards while seemingly losing a grip on his relationships with his wife and daughters.
Reviews
‘Set in Henrithvale in north-western Victoria, this is a haunting little novel that draws together elements of magic realism and sports writing, bush gothic and the Western, to create an unsettling and melancholy portrait of rural decline… A quietly evocative novel wreathed in beauty and despair.’ — The Saturday Age, Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Brisbane Times.
‘A social realist novel about one of our most biting realities – the withering of rural Australia; its farmlands, its towns and its footy clubs.’ — Martin Flanagan.
‘This sombre, lyrical novel is haunted by the history of families, of cultures, and of the land itself. At once gritty and dream-like, the story of Vic’s struggle to understand a world changing around him even as it cannot escape the ghosts of the past, is told in quietly gorgeous prose full of the dusty beauty of the desert, the tangled terrors and joys of farming a landscape literally drained dry by the men whose legacy made Vic the man he is, and the agonized crumbling of a community and a way of life threatening to leave entire generations behind. Pearce offers a powerful look at masculinity, colonialism and the things that bind us to our parents, our children, and our friends.’— Prof. Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University.
‘This is a story of football heroes and dying women. It is also a ghost story, in which the traditions of patriarchy haunt a family and a country town. Writing prose rich with the poetic and the Australian vernacular, Scott Pearce is an exciting new voice in Australian literature. He has written a novel that is uniquely ours and uniquely for our times.’ — Maria Takolander
It’s just academic
I also like to write academic articles about film and television. My main areas of interest are Westerns, New Hollywood, and the Apocalyptic/Post-Apocalyptic genres.
Most of my published work is not open access. Despair! I am certain you were keen to find out how Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society and his conception of moral individualism relates to masculine performance in the American Western. Ask me about it. Please. Someone, someone, anyone.
Here is a link to: Emotional Landscapes, or Running with Cormac McCarthy During a Pandemic
https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/296
Here is a link to: Narrativizing Trauma in the Apocalypse: Christianity and Burial in AMC’s The Walking Dead
Pictures
In the morning I go running in the dark along lonely and isolated trails. Sometimes I take photos of the sunrise and sometimes the sun is late, or I am too early. Then I take photos of the shadows. For a time I was obsessed with photographing pre-1970 abandoned cars, then there was a brief wildlife period. These are highlights.
