James Cummins (author)

James Cummins
James Cummins at Edzna archaeological site
Born	(1981-12-13) December 13, 1981 Grande Cache, Alberta
Occupation	Business executive and author
Nationality	Canadian
Education	Bachelor of Arts
Alma mater	Concordia University
Genre	fiction, nonfiction, history, stage plays
Notable works	Ambrosia: About a Culture
Notable awards	2009 Canadian Authors Association's BookTelevision Emerging Writer Award

James Cummins (born December 13, 1981) is a Canadian author and businessperson. In 2009 Cummins was awarded the Canadian Authors Association's BookTelevision Emerging Writer Award for his book Ambrosia: About a Culture. He began his professional writing career as a playwright in 2000 and has published books on Electronica music, legal history, business, spirituality, and philosophy. Cummins is a graduate of both the Victoria School of Performing and Visual Arts and Concordia University.

His works include co-authoring the autobiography of House music inventor Jesse Saunders House Music... The Real Story, The Midas Touch: Counterfeit Stock, Naked Short Selling & Selling America Short (a history of stock market activism in the lead up to the Great Recession of 2008), and God Goes to Work: New Thought Paths to Prosperity and Profits. He was also the sole author for books including The Knotted Road and The Journal: 60 years of people, prose, and publication - a history of the McGill Law Journal.

Early life and education

Cummins was born in Grande Cache, Alberta on December 13, 1981, and was a competitive swimmer during his youth.^[1][2] He also worked as a model, and his first television appearance was as an on-stage escort for the contestants of the Canadian Search for Miss Universe 1998,^[3] broadcast by the CBC. He then attended the Victoria School of Performing and Visual Arts in Edmonton, Alberta, followed by the Concordia University College of Alberta for undergraduate studies, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the campus newspaper the Blue and White and stage-manager for several of the university's stage productions. Cummins graduated from Concordia University in Montreal with a BA in philosophy and a minor in political science,^[4][5] having previously lived in both St. Albert and Sherwood Park.^[6][7]

Early career

Early books and plays

Program from the original production of Splinters by James Cummins

Cummins began his writing career as a playwright during his senior year at Victoria School. In May 2000 he had two plays produced at the Carnival Of Shrieking Youth Arts Festival in Edmonton, Alberta, including The Poet and Charon. The Edmonton Journal wrote of his work that "Charon ... by 17-year-old playwright James Cummins, charts a journey through the afterlife. Cummins has a second play in the festival, The Poet, which chronicles what happens when a poet comes to town, lives in a tree, unleashes 'all sorts of chaos,' and 'starts getting blamed for things that go wrong.'" Both plays were first staged on May 14, 2000 at the TransAlta Arts Barns.^[8]

In 2000 he also wrote, acted in, and produced the play In Response at the Edmonton Fringe Festival, where the Edmonton Journal stated "A few Fringes from now, James Cummins may be a dramatic force to contend with among the deafening roar of monologists", while giving him a particularly bad one-star review, writing "It is also a suffocatingly static show, with Cummins delivering most of his oratory while leaning on a straight-backed chair. There is clever, thoughtful writing here but the experience comes off more as lecture than theatre". The play was shown over the span of the festival, from August 17 to the 27th in 2000 at "B" Scene Studios in Edmonton.^[6] In Response also appeared in the novel The Phoenix Index: Never Rain, published in 2001. The work of fiction was based upon the author's time working at the World Water Park as a teenager—the largest indoor water park in the world.^[9] He then published the book Waves Crash in 2003, a compilation of work including Cummins' novel Song in the Head, a novelized version of Charon, and a short philosophical treatise entitled Proximus Limen.^[10]

In October 2003, Cummins wrote and performed a stage monologue for the Vocal Locals festival held at Seedy's Pub in Edmonton.^[11] In 2004 he then wrote and performed stage monologues for Sound & Fury Theatre's annual One's A Crowd Festival at the Jekyll & Hyde Pub in Edmonton.^[12] In 2005 Cummins also returned to the Carnival Of Shrieking Youth Arts Festival with his new play Splinters, a multimedia stage play centered on the concepts of schizophrenia and the underground rave scene.^[13][14] The play was first staged at the TransAlta Arts Barns in Edmonton on May 13, 2005.^[15]

Contemporary career

James Cummins at the 2012 launch of The Midas Touch in Montreal, Quebec

Ambrosia: About a Culture by James Cummins

In 2007 Cummins was the co-author of the autobiography of House music founder Jesse Saunders, entitled House Music... The Real Story.^[16] Nu Soul Magazine wrote that "the book is more than a simple biography. It also acts as an examination of dance music itself".^[17] Cummins was then awarded the 2009 Canadian Authors Association's BookTelevision Emerging Writer Award for his book Ambrosia: About a Culture—the award was given to that year's "Canadian (or landed immigrant) writer under 30 deemed to show most promise in the field of literary creation".^[18] The book is a history of the culture and music of Electronica, based on several hundred personal interviews with individuals in the DJ and electronic music industry.^[4] Excalibur reviewed the book stating that, "Even if you don’t know a thing about the genre, this book will open up your eyes to the culture, giving you a closer look at the origins of the music and the artists behind it."^[19] The Rover literary review called the book "a pertinent work" and stated that it "advances a forceful invitation to take the electronica culture seriously".^[20] Following the award, Cummins provided a reading and lecture to the Canadian Authors Association's Montreal chapter at the Westmount Library in Montreal on November 17, 2009.^[21]

In 2008 James Cummins published the book The Knotted Road, a book of epistemology focusing on a theory of knowledge categorization.^[22] Then in 2010 James Cummins coauthored the book God Goes to Work: New Thought Paths to Prosperity and Profits with Tom Zender, with a foreword from Deepak Chopra.^[23] The work focused on how to integrate a person's spirituality into their business practices. In response to the book reviewer Lysa Allman-Baldwin wrote that, "Spirituality and business may be more connected than you think".^[24]

In 2012 Cummins published The Midas Touch: Counterfeit Stock, Naked Short Selling & Selling America Short, a book that covered the history of the anti-naked short selling movement in the United States^[25] and was released on June 6, 2012.^[26][27] Vice Magazine reviewed the book, stating that the book exposed "a really, really simplified version" of something almost impossible to understand "because it’s incredibly technical".^[28] Cummins published a second book in 2012 entitled Tales from the Visitor Class in Montreal, a compilation of the previously unpublished novels GuidingHand_777 and A Temple for Oysters and Ferns, as well as the absurdist stage play The Sublime. The book compilation was put together in order to publicly release some of the unpublished fiction Cummins wrote while living in Montreal.^[29]

In 2013 he published the book The Journal: 60 years of people, prose, and publication, which examines the history of the McGill Law Journal upon the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary as well as the history of legal journals in Canada. The book contains interviews with former Journal editors and a complete review of the history of the publication in the context of the Canadian legal and publishing community since 1952.^[30]

Works

Novels

• The Phoenix Index: Never Rain (2001)
• Song in the Head, published in Waves Crash (2003)
• Charon, published in Waves Crash (2003)
• GuidingHand_777, published in Tales from the Visitor Class in Montreal (2012)
• A Temple for Oysters and Ferns, published in Tales from the Visitor Class in Montreal (2012)

Non-fiction

• Proximus Limen, published in Waves Crash (2003)
• House Music... The Real Story (2007)
• Ambrosia: About a Culture (2008)
• The Knotted Road (2008)
• God Goes to Work (2010)
• The Midas Touch: Counterfeit Stock, Naked Short Selling, and Selling America Short (2012)
• The Journal: 60 Years of People, Prose, and Publication (2013)

Plays

• The Poet, produced at the Carnival of Shrieking Youth (2000)
• Charon, produced at the Carnival of Shrieking Youth (2000)
• In Response, produced at the Edmonton Fringe (2000), published in The Phoenix Index: Never Rain (2001)
• Splinters, produced at the Carnival of Shrieking Youth (2005)
• The Sublime, published in Tales from the Visitor Class in Montreal (2012)

References