Featured Interview With Chadwick Wall
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in New Orleans and its suburbs, and have lived in so many states, even in another country–but for the last seven years I’ve resided in Austin, Texas. I’ve written for various publications–for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Sewanee Purple, the Riverside Reader, the Baton Rouge Advocate, and most recently Austin.com. But I fell into my groove when I returned to writing fiction–I’ve published two novels, Water Lessons and The Second Cortez.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My mother taught me to read at age four, and I believe she helped instill in me a love for language, books, and the written word. She would teach me to read at home, and one day when she was driving me through Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, she was shocked to hear me read off a sign that we passed: “Danger, High Voltage”. Then a year later, when I was five, I realized I wanted to be a writer. Since then, I’ve felt that I HAD to write, that there was no other way. Age five is when I started to write creatively.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
It’s hard to name only a few. Walker Percy–who I knew briefly as a boy (see my website for the blog piece). Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Papa Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Herman Hesse, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust, Cormac McCarthy. Shakespeare and Cervantes. There are many others. So many writers I have not named here also inspire my writing.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The Second Cortez is my second and latest novel, published in June 2018. Originally, I wanted to depict the experiences and struggles of a desperate man who crosses into the United States illegally, but in this particular case that man is a young but esteemed professor-turned-fugitive. Years spent living in the Southwest and a decades-long interest in Mexico and the American West also helped inspire the novel. This is one of those novels that began with both a character and a situation, in the author’s head. I spent five months writing the first draft. Then about a year and a half working with two different professional editors: a widely-known developmental editor and a copyeditor/proofreader. The novel went through five drafts, and the ending alone changed three times. I also spent considerable time and money researching for The Second Cortez. It was all so worth it, and thoroughly enjoyable.
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