Featured Interview With Gary Guinn
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in a small town in the southern Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, in what was then a very rural area. It was a great place to grow up, but of course I couldn’t wait to leave. After a few years of bouncing around in several colleges and the military, I decided it wasn’t such a bad place to live after all. After getting a master’s degree in literature and marrying a hometown girl, I started teaching at the local college. Two kids and about twenty cows on a small farm later, I finished my PhD and settled in for the duration.
I taught creative writing and literature, directed plays, acted in plays and musicals, made a lot of friends, had a good career. The kids grew up, we sold the farm, and I started seriously writing fiction. We traveled a lot in Europe and Central America, wished we could settle down in Italy or Greece, but always loved coming home. Now our two dogs–Seamus, a Lab mix; and Peanut, a Corgi mix–fill the empty nest nicely. We still travel, learned to sail, and I write fiction and brew beer. And drink what I don’t share.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My father and mother were readers. I still have two of the earliest picture books my father gave me–Dr Squash the Doll Doctor and The Puppy Who Found a Boy. Maybe my real fascination with books, though, began on my eleventh birthday, when my parents gave me a copy of Treasure Island. I was mesmerized. I still have my copy of that book too, and I gave both my sons a copy of their own on their eleventh birthdays. As an English professor, my whole professional life was books, but I didn’t begin writing fiction seriously until midway in my teaching career. Maybe I’m a mid-life crisis writer, but my first novel was inspired by events in my family’s history.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
The two kinds of literature I love, read, and write are literary fiction and crime fiction. In literary fiction, I admire and have been influenced by Louise Erdrich, John Irving, and Louis Nordan. My first novel, A Late Flooding Thaw, is literary/historical. In crime fiction, I admire especially the Scandinavian writers of what is known as Nordic Noir. Hakan Nesser, Joe Nesbo, and Stieg Larsson are a few of my favorites. I also admire the Belgian writer Georges Simenon in his Inspector Maigret novels, and the British writer Colin Dexter in his Inspector Morse novels. My novel Sacrificial Lam, the first in a series of Lam Corso suspense novels, was influenced by these writers.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The first Lam Corso novel, Sacrificial Lam, released March 3rd, is actually based on real events early in my teaching career, when three professors received anonymous death threats. In the novel, Dr. Lam Corso, an outspoken progressive English professor, teaches at a small southern university, where his views are sometimes unpopular. The book opens with a death threat, which Corso thinks is a joke by one of his colleagues. He is, after all, living the perfect life. But escalating threats and violence, with the police unable to find any leads, force Lam to take action. His wife, an avid anti-gun activist, is outraged when he brings a gun into the house. But when the violence extends beyond Lam to his family, Lam and Susan are forced to examine their marriage and their cherished values. The novel poses the question, what will it take to survive?
I worked on the novel for approximately a year and a half, and I was very aware that the themes of intolerance and violence against differing views were very appropriate to our contemporary society.
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