About Todd
Todd was born in San Francisco on October 17, 1949 at 6:33 in the morning and began making up stories shortly thereafter. He started performing his stories and songs for his classmates in the first grade, and before his teachers or parents could deter him, he had become a prolific writer and musician. He was a thespian and athlete in high school, took up the piano, and attended college from 1967-69 at the brand new University of California at Santa Cruz. He left academia (forever, so far) to roam around North and Central America and learn how to play the guitar.
His fiction began to appear in national magazines in 1975 with the publication of "Willow" in Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1978, Doubleday published Todd's critically acclaimed novel Inside Moves, which was made into a motion picture in 1980. His second novel, Forgotten Impulses, was published in 1980 by Simon and Schuster and was chosen by The New York Times as one of the best novels of that year. Louie & Women was published by Dutton in 1983, and Night Train was published by Mercury House in 1986.
It took Todd ten years to convince yet another publisher to take a chance with him. Bantam published his fifth novel, Ruby & Spear, in 1996. His first non-fiction work, Open Body: Creating Your Own Yoga, was published by Avon in 1998. Todd's fable "Of Water and Melons" was published by Red Wing Press in 1999. In May of 2000, Ten Speed Press published The Writer's Path, a book of Todd's original writing exercises co-written with Mindy Toomay.
Todd was the founding Chair of the Creative Writing Department of the California State Summer School for the Arts from 1986-1991. He subsequently spent a number of years introducing his highly effective and innovative writing exercises to writers of all ages and levels of experience.
Todd lived in Sacramento, California from 1980-1994 where he wrote personal essays for the free weekly The Sacramento News & Review. He also wrote a number of novels, plays, screenplays, and songs. He moved to Berkeley, California in 1995 and stayed until 2005, making ends meet as an editor, ghost writer and pruner of fruit trees, while continuing to write more of the aforementioned plays, novels, screenplays, and songs. He currently resides in Mendocino, California.
About Under the Table Books
"Under the Table Books" is the title of our favorite yet-to-be-published novel, and we are using that title for the name of our company and web site because we love the ideas and images those four words evoke, and because the philosophy underpinning the bookstore in that novel is also the philosophy of our creative life. What is that philosophy? Buckminster Fuller, one of our most important mentors, put it thusly:
I assumed that nature would "evaluate" my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature's principles, I would find my work being economically sustained.
This is a totally non-linear, and some would say illogical, paradigm for making one's way in the world, but we feel it is precisely how the universe operates. In that same chapter of his opus Critical Path, Fuller says that this sustenance from Nature would only continue if, "I never asked anyone to listen to me and spoke informatively to others only when they asked me to do so, and if I never undertook competitively to produce artifacts others were developing, and attended only to that which no others attended."
Fuller is speaking here about originality and integrity, among other things. We suppose if Under the Table Books were to have a motto, originality and integrity would figure prominently therein. To further elucidate the philosophy of Under the Table Books, we append a favorite quote from e.e. cummings:
Almost anyone can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people, but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
We have, on more than one occasion, nearly given up the fight, but then something — usually in our darkest hour — compels us to keep going and renew our trust in the impeccable wisdom of Nature.