I am currently querying a novel, an international crime mystery set in northeast United States and Scandinavia, working on a second, and developing several short creative nonfiction works. I hope to have updates about that work in the near future.
You can find my current essays on culture, art, and communication at two locations. Publication is approximately once per week, give or take:
- The publishing site Medium, at medium.com/@james.irwin. Medium is an entire ecosystem. For $5.00 a month you have access to informative and compelling articles on nearly every imaginable subject. It is like subscribing to the biggest magazine in the world. While a few articles each month will be free to access, most content on Medium is only for members.
- The same articles are also published on my newsletter Communicatoring on Substack at communicatoring.substack.com. The newsletter is currently free to subscribe, however I am grateful for those who support the newsletter by pay subscription, which is $5.00 a month or the deep discount of $30.00 for the year.
My first brush with this world was editing and publishing a literary magazine as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh. Since then I’ve published many articles on media, arts, culture, and communication in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals.
I was a contributing writer of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that city’s morning daily newspaper, where I covered film, photography, and related media arts and events, publishing many reviews, interviews, and feature profiles. Also in that city I was founding film editor of the weekly tabloid Steel City Star.
During my time in San Francisco I wrote features on arts and culture for West Coast publications such as the Bay Guardian, Anima, Spiral, City Arts, Artweek, and Release Print. I was a co-founder of the San Francisco-based media arts journal Cinematograph, and co-authored the grant application that earned us our seed funding. I contributed multiple essays to Cinematograph including a profile of the film artist Gunvor Nelson, and a lengthy appreciation of the films of BAFTA and British Film Institute award-winning director Peter Greenaway. I also wrote catalogue essays for exhibitions at the San Francisco International Film Festival and Film Arts Festival, and the Transamerica Pyramid Galleries. One of my more notorious pieces was the cover story of the inaugural edition of Shift Magazine, a profile of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and its leadership team.
Since 1993 I’ve served as an associate editor of the Atlantic Journal of Communication, an academic journal concerned with the study of communication theory, practice, and policy. I also chaired the editorial committee for the tenth anniversary edition. I have contributed essays as well; a piece on digital film making published in 2010 was, for years, the journal’s most-request article reprint.
I also work as a consulting writer and editor, with an emphasis on feature stories and marketing communication campaigns.