Raised in the Hudson Valley, Austin Metze and his wife Lainey have lived in Woodstock for over twenty seven years. The first half of his life was equally divided between painting and magazine art direction, working almost extensively for Time Warner, art directing for Time, People, Book-of-the-Month Club and others.  He has always written narrative poetry and he views his memoir as an outgrowth of his poems. In When life calls you out, it’s usually onto a Highway, he toggles back and forth between the two forms, sometimes combining them in the same piece. His work is highly visual in nature and it can be said that he is still painting, but this time with words.

“Growing up in the forties and fifties,” he says, “even though the roads hadn’t quite caught up to the  powerful machines that traveled them — in fact most were merely paved over horse trails — my generation took to the highway like today’s youth the internet.”

“As I write about the past I better understand who I am. I write with one eye on the rearview mirror and one on the road ahead,” says Metze.