Featured Interview With Gary Walters
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I work full time in the hospitality industry and I am a business school graduate from an accredited university. An avid reader, The Thorns Beneath the Rose is my first novel and the first in a planned trilogy.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I became interested in books, both fiction and non-fiction once I had learned to read during the middle of my primary school years. I started writing late in life. I attempted short stories and novels after taking a creative writing class. The class was one available through a city recreational program offered in the evenings. It was just one of many evening classes one could take, classes in French or Italian cooking, pottery, self-defense, golf, painting, were also available. In such a casual program, you only scratch the surface of knowledge in creative writing. As I was already in my early fifties, I put aside writing for awhile as I had neither the time nor the money to go back to school full time. My one university degree is in business, not the arts. Eventually, I decided to increase my knowledge of creative writing by reading several books on the subject.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Shakespeare, Hemingway, Dickens, Atwood and Vonnegut on the fiction side.
Jane Mayer, Peter Frase, David Suzuki and Jeff Rubin on the non-fiction side.
I like a fair variety of genres from standard literary work to mystery/thrill and increasingly, science fiction/fantasy. I must also give credit to non-fiction works on subject matter concerning creative writing, sociology, political science, economics, history and works on predicting the future.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
As a schoolboy, I had some exposure to the mythologies of the Greek and Norse gods which often dealt with the basic human issues of moral choice, in addition to exposure of the teachings of traditional Christian Sunday School classes that many of my generation were required, or almost required, it seemed, to take which also discussed, at some basic level, issues of moral choice.
It never occurred to me to link “Big Picture” issues of our modern times with Mythology and Fantasy, despite my love of “Slaughterhouse-Five’ until I read, in my later years, novels such as Martin’s “Game of Thrones”, Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”, Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” and last but certainly not least, given its satirical flavor, Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”.
These works as well as exposure to the current issues of the day provided the spark to write “The Thorns Beneath the Rose, Book One”.
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