Q:
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Tell us about your
latest work—title, genre, etc. — and why you wrote it?
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A:
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The book is called Missionaries and Indians, a play on
Cowboys and Indians, a game we played as kids, although here the Indians are
not Native Americans, but from the country of India. The
narrator, Ben, and his twin sister, Naomi, who are sixteen, are on holiday
from school and living with their Lutheran missionary parents in their home
beside one of India’s sacred rivers.
They experience a cyclone and devastating floods; think about what it
takes to be a successful missionary; are influenced by different types of
sermons; have ups and downs on a houseboat trip on the river; hear the story
of a single-woman missionary who was taken to court; are caught up in a
political riot; suffer through the illness of a little child; get involved in
an incident in which a missionary kills a monkey; listen to another
missionary teen-ager talk about being a fantasy spy; discuss sex education;
accompany a missionary on a tiger-hunting trip; and enjoy a holiday at the
beach.
The question of
genre is an interesting one for this book.
Originally the publisher, AuthorHouse, put it down as a book on
religion, but I convinced them that, although there will of course be
religious elements in a book with “missionaries” in the title, the book was
not primarily religious. After some
discussion/negotiation with AuthorHouse and the book’s publicist, we decided
that the genre was best described as action/adventure. We also decided to cast the book as a
coming-of-age narrative because teen-age Ben, the protagonist, is constantly
finding out more about life as the stories in the book are told. Further, we concluded that the book was not
a novel in the conventional sense; that is, there was not an overall
narrative arc that carried the reader from beginning to end, although some
major themes persisted throughout.
Rather, there are multiple arcs, like the contrails in the skies above
a busy airport (some of them crossing each other), as each chapter tells its
main and subsidiary stories centered around a main theme. Call the book a picaresque novel, modeled
on something like the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When you have read all the stories, a
picture should emerge that comprehensively captures the missionary and Indian
experience.
I started to write
the book to see if I could relate some good stories about my very interesting
childhood. I wanted to see if I could
provide an honest account of what life was like for a teenager with
missionary parents in India in the 1950s.
Also, I wanted to avoid casting missionaries and Indians as either
saints or sinners, as other books have done.
As I got into the stories, I realized that there were two levels of
the writing that would be of interest to many people. The first level is the stories themselves,
which involve exciting yarns (e.g., hunting a man-eating tiger, getting
caught in a political riot), interesting settings (e.g., a very large river,
missionary houses, the local bazaar), lovable characters (e.g., Pastor
Timothy, Wally, Miss Malayalam, Uncle Eli, Aunt Emma, Uncle Jim) and not so
lovable ones (e.g., Uncle Frank, Reverend Joseph), and vivid imagery (e.g.,
the river delta as the many arms of a Hindu goddess). Then there is the level of what the stories
might mean which deals with several perennially important themes in the
everyday lives of people: evolution and change (e.g., biological evolution,
children growing up); human relationships among various groups of people (parents
and children; missionaries and servants; Indians and missionaries) that
included both tolerance and intolerance, inclusion and exclusion; fake things
(e.g., false accusations, poor quality products) versus real things (e.g.,
honesty in relationships, good quality actions), order versus chaos (e.g., in
building a church or creating a new state); fantasy (pretending to be a spy) versus
reality (knowing the spy story to be false); taking risks (e.g., climbing
around the outside of a moving train, hunting a tiger at night), sex
education (or lack of it); and religious beliefs (Christianity, Hinduism,
Islam, Buddhism).
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Q:
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What draws you to
your genre(s)? Why is this type of story compelling to you?
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A:
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I have always seen
life as a series of adventures.
Although I am a rather shy person who is awkward in social situations,
I have always felt the urge to try out new things like teaching or conducting
research in foreign countries or walking by myself in the fells (mountains)
of the English Lake District (which I close to where I live). And I like to tell stories inspired by
those adventures where I put people in a position of conflict or potential
danger, build up the tension, and then see how things work out. At the same time, I think that an
action/adventure story is a good way to dramatize an idea or theme. It gets the reader involved, imagining that
they are in the story. Also, an
adventure story is a good way of developing characters because you can see
how they behave in a stressed situation.
Say I want to illustrate some ideas about taking risks. Should one take risks? Under what circumstances? Why do people take risks? Let’s illustrate these ideas with a story
about our hero trailing along when a missionary, who is perhaps not the
greatest hunter in the world, goes off in the dark of night in pursuit of a
man-eating tiger. Why does the
missionary want to hunt the tiger? How
is our hero going to react when things get a bit sticky?
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Q:
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What is your writing
process like? Do you map the whole thing out or do you just let it unfold?
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A:
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I would say mainly the latter. Suppose I remember a story about the time a
missionary shot and killed a monkey by mistake. That was a terrible thing to do and
resulted in a serious cultural clash.
I do not know what the end of this story is, but I start to write down
how the incident might have occurred and I begin to develop a character, a
lovable but often rather feckless missionary who comes to Ben’s father for
advice. What is to be done? Well, let’s bring in an educated Indian who
was converted to Christianity from Hinduism.
Perhaps he can bridge the gap between cultures. And so the story unfolds and I begin to
focus on the theme of cultural conflict and possible resolution. Now is the time to do a bit of organizing
or mapping of the material to make a coherent story. Think of the whole process as starting with
a seed of an idea, letting it germinate and grow, and then tending it by
pruning and shaping it.
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Q:
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What kind of
research was involved?
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A:
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I did library
research to fill in some gaps in my knowledge about some of the stories and
themes in the book. This led me to
reading books on Indian history, European influences on India, Hinduism,
Martin Luther and Lutheranism, and hunting man-eating tigers. I also read a play
by a famous Telegu playwright, a missionary’s memoir, and information about
the creation of the Telegu state. Wikipedia and other on-line sources
were used to clear about minor points.
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Q:
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How much of YOU
makes it into your characters?
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A:
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The answer is quite
a lot. What the narrator, Ben, does
and thinks is based a great deal on my own experiences. But the book is not an autobiography. In some stories I wanted to disguise the
identities of people who might still be alive. In order to tell my stories in a meaningful
way, I fictionalized events in many instances. An example: Hans in the book is based on
two or three missionary children I knew.
One day one of them told me that he would love to put on a disguise
and do something like wander about India being a spy. Well, he didn’t ever do that, but he was
the kind of guy who had the imagination for it and he sparked my imagination
to concoct a story.
My perceptive niece
asked me if I saw myself in the seven-year old nerdy Wally and I had to say
“yes.” Was there a subconscious
identification with my school nickname, Willy? Sometimes the views and actions of
characters other than Ben reflect my own ideas on such things as religion and
politics. For example: Uncle Wilhelm is
my ideal missionary, able to live in the world of his parishioners as well as
his own. Uncle Frank, on the other
hand, who puts down local culture and religion, represents what I deplore in
a certain type of missionary. I favor
those who seek to tolerate and include as opposed to those who are intolerant
and exclusive.
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Q:
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How do you balance
the need to have time to write with the needs of family, society, etc.?
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A:
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Since I am retired
it might seem that I enjoy the luxury of having all the time in the world to
write. There are, however, many
demands on one’s time, even when a career is formally over. When I left my last university post, I
continued to carry out academic research for several years. Recently, I have been spending more and
more of my time caring for my wife who is quite frail. This entails taking on the household chores
she used to do so well. But I still
have plenty of time to write.
I had a teacher who
told us that when he shared an office with John Barth at Penn State, he
discovered that the author of The Sot
Weed Factor and other great books went home each evening, went into his
study, closed the door, and wrote for several hours. If I could do that (and I have read that
this is the recommended way to go) all would be fine. Unfortunately, I am a sporadic writer; I
have sudden inspirations and rush to write them down. What I lack is discipline, but I am sure
there are ways to cure that fault. I
started writing stories for Missionaries
and Indians soon after retirement, more than a dozen years ago. If I wrote for a living, that sort of time
frame would be untenable.
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Q:
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Have there been any
authors in particular, that inspired your writing?
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A:
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I am inspired by
reading and re-reading a handful of what are considered to be classics in
literature. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, my favorite novel, does it
all: furious action and high adventure mixed with deep contemplation, a heady
concoction of metaphysical flights of fancy and absorbing details of the
lives of whalers, a sense of the mystery and unkowableness of life, on and on. I admire Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men for its throbbing
narrative drive and its unique combination of theme, plot, and
characterization. Huckleberry Finn serves as a model for my picaresque novel; also,
no one is better than Mark Twain at injecting humor into stories. Poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge can be read for the obvious rhythms of the language and
ability to elicit a whole range of emotions.
I enjoy a novel like The Sot Weed
Factor by John Barth for its exuberance, raucous humor, and intricate
plot. Thomas Hardy is rarely equaled
in his ability to create an overall atmosphere (Return of the Native) or to set up scenes with the use of vivid
imagery (Far From the Madding Crowd). The
Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is exceptional in its ability to meld large
ideas like the meaning of life and death with the everyday lives of its
characters. And then there is perhaps
the archetypal coming-of-age novel The
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Many of these influences are quoted or referenced in Missionaries and Indians.
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Q:
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Is there a story you
want to tell behind or about your work(s)?
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A:
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I have come across
depictions of missionaries and missionary life that either praised the
missionary endeavor to the high heavens or else viciously attacked
missionaries and their ways. So we get
hagiographies of people like Mother Teresa and accounts that take the exact
opposite view as Christopher Hitchens does in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. I suppose both kinds of writing makes good
copy, but neither view mirrored my experience and I wanted a chance to say
so. I also, like some other children
of missionaries I know, was sensitive to the bad press that missionaries
sometimes get.
Thus I started out
to set the record on missionaries straight, at least from my
perspective. But as I went along
composing stories it occurred to me that I was focusing too narrowly on the
“missionary question.” The tales, I began
to realize, had universal application, they dealt with situations that people
everywhere experience every day. So I
broadened my view of the missionary enterprise as being just one example of
what goes on in the wide world. I felt
I needed to lighten up and not worry so much about how others felt about
people like my parents. They were,
after all, in many ways, just like anyone else.
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Q:
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What other projects
are you currently working on or about to start?
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A:
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I have written
several short stories that I would like to see published someday. Again, they are fictionalized accounts of
places I have lived and things I have experienced. Two are set in Africa, two in Pennsylvania,
one in the foothills of the Rockies, one in France, and one in Afghanistan. They are centered on themes dear to my
heart: Third World Development, social class, power relations, and
coming-of-age.
I spent most of my
working life as an academic geographer. I have written a non-fiction book, Freedom to Roam: Research Adventures of a
Human Geographer. Here I tell true
stories about projects I have been involved in in several countries. In its own way, the book belongs to the
action/adventure genre, being light on academic issues and emphasizing the
journeys that my colleagues and I took to understand more about the
world. The book is unique in that it
engages throughout with an extended walking metaphor, illustrated by my many
rambles among the English Lake District fells.
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Q:
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Could you share some
of your marketing strategies? Which ones are the most effective in your
opinion?
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A:
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Due to my lack of
expertise in marketing, I paid AuthorHouse to arrange the marketing of Missionaries and Indians, mainly
through the services of a publicist working for a marketing agency. I did give away copies to family, friends,
and neighbors and several of them told me they urged others to purchase a
copy, so there is a snowball effect there, but it starts with a pretty small
snowball and I do not expect it will build a very large snowman. AuthorHouse encouraged me to get into
social media with the book and I suppose this would be of huge benefit to
many authors who have multiple contacts, but my knowledge and inclinations
for this direction are virtually nonexistent.
The publicist and I collaborated on promotional material and she has
been working away steadily at sending it out to dozens of outlets that focus
on the action/adventure genre, Young Adults and Adults, Christian and
Lutheran interests, local media, educational institutions I have attended or
worked at, Hinduism and spirituality, human interest stories, travel and
Geography. I also paid for a radio
interview with Stu Taylor, an experience that was not as bad as I had
feared. We shall have to wait and see
how successful these strategies have been.
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Q:
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What would be the
top five, (or 3 or 1 or however many) things you would tell aspiring authors?
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A:
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One. It is a cliché to say follow your passions,
but I say it anyway. Someone I know
who was not a missionary child told me my love of India and growing up there
comes through to her in my book. Write
about things you can get emotional about, that have meaning for you.
Two. Practice what I preach and not what I do
and try to make your writing a regular habit.
If at one session you feel you have not done so well, you can always revise
(as I do; often). Keep things on the
boil, but then let the pot simmer for a while, adding ingredients to suit
your taste. As our Latin teacher used
to say, festina lente, or make
haste slowly. Get on with it and then
take time to reflect and revise (I just changed this sentence around).
Three. I do not think it is always of benefit to
take a creative writing course or read books on how to write. For better or worse, I did neither. Courses and books, however, may be fine for
some and I know have helped to create some very successful writers. I suspect the quality of courses can be
very variable, so they would need to be chosen wisely. I think you consciously or unconsciously
pick up many tips about writing from reading good literature and reviews of
books in good newspapers and journals.
Four. Choose
(select, pick, decide on) the words you use carefully. It pays to take the time to find a word
that is just that bit better in expressing what you want to say or to avoid
repeating the same word too often. I
always keep both a thesaurus and a dictionary close to hand.
Q. What role does
humor play in your work?
A. It plays a very
important role. I hadn’t really
thought about humor in Missionaries and
Indians until some friends mentioned how much they appreciated it. Then I realized from the reactions of a few
people who had read the book that they were taking it too seriously. Perhaps they thought if you wrote or read
about missionaries you had to adopt a somber mood. No, just about any topic lends itself to
humor, I think. Humor is an antidote,
a foil, to serious ideas and it helps to develop plot and character. Thus the drunken porter scene follows
immediately after Macbeth is murdered.
In my book, Ben’s father has a bad temper, but is also known for his
dry wit. Exactly 500 years after
Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany I
can’t help poking some fun at the old boy, even though I think he is one of
history’s greats. The chapter on sex
(the title is a pun) has some fun in it because sex is funny. The deadly serious monkey business is
leavened with jokes about evolution and reincarnation. And so on.
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