Cal Massey

Cal Massey is a retired Florida newspaper editor turned late-blooming experimental novelist, rooted in Flagler Beach, Florida. He is not the jazz trumpeter Calvin Massey (1928-1972) or the painter and Marvel illustrator Calvin L. Massey (1926-2019); both share the name and neither is connected to this writer. He spent the final stretch of his journalism career as Deputy Managing Editor of The Daytona Beach News-Journal, serving as the paper's enterprise and Sunday editor, and retired in 2016 after a career that won him awards he has described as being for news that was not fake.

His debut novel, Own Little Worlds, won the 2020 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel from the Journal of Experimental Fiction, a $1,000 prize judged by Jason E. Rolfe, who called the manuscript masterful in its pacing and voice. JEF Books published it in spring 2022, making it his first novel at the age of 65. A political dark comedy set in post-Trump America, it follows a retired editor and a laid-off reporter chasing a conspiracy through a presidential election; Massey calls the book a shapeshifter, since it turns into a play about two-thirds of the way through and then turns back, and sums it up as a tragedy you can dance to.

Massey has continued to publish short fiction since the novel; his story The Best Version of You appeared in New Critique (UK) in September 2024. He lives in Flagler Beach with his wife of more than four decades, Lynn, and six cats.

Start with Own Little Worlds, his only JEF title and the book the Patchen Award recognized.