Matt, a fledgling screenwriter, volunteers to work with the terminally ill in exchange for a good plot for his next script. He meets the people who work, die, and mourn in this world of last moments. In the novel-in-stories style of Tim O'Brien's July July and Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love, O'Connell's characters in Evacuation Plan reveal themselves in poignantly unfolding stories: the gambler who played a risky game involving his wife and his ex-con father; the mortician who was an unwed father-to-be; the daughter whose dying father has no clue about the night her world spun out of control; the nurse who lived among aging neighbors and struggled to hold her own family in place; the drunk who magically encountered himself as a boy. Forgiveness, joy, making the final leap. Evacuation Plan is the story of a world in which the clock ticks off the final moments for all of us and makes of those moments a lifetime.
Joe O'Connell teaches writing at Austin Community College and St. Edward's University. After receiving a journalism degree from Southwest Texas State University, he worked as a newspaper reporter and editor around Texas, concentrating on politics and winning awards for both feature writing and investigative journalism from the Texas Press Association and the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. He returned to the school to forever be known as SWT to pursue an MFA in creative writing. While there he worked long distance with the famed short story writer Andre Dubus.
Joe's short fiction has been widely published in literary journals including The G.W. Review, Other Voices, Lullwater Review and Confrontation's special issue on Southern writing. His stories have taken first prize in both the Deep South Writers Conference and the Louzelle Rose Barclay Awards.
His novel EVACUATION PLAN is loosely inspired by time spent with the terminally ill at Hospice Austin's Christopher House and hailed by the Austin American-Statesman as "Tales alternately gentle, dramatic, surrealistic, that collectively affirm the beauty of being alive, even as they acknowledge that all of us face the necessity of making our own 'evacuation plan.' " It was the No. 1 bestseller at Austin's BookPeople, won the North Texas Book Award and was a finalist for the Violet Crown Book Award.
He is also a screenwriter who turned a budding career as a movie extra--including two days as a topless bar patron in Varsity Blues and one day as a blurry guy on the telephone in Courage Under Fire--into a gig as a film industry columnist, formerly for the Austin American-Statesman--where he also was an assistant entertainment editor and published numerous personal essays--and currently for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. His articles have also appeared in Texas Monthly, Variety, Video Business and the San Antonio Express-News.
