Featured Interview With Curtis Edmonds
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
My name is Curtis Edmonds. I’m a lawyer by trade. I represent people with disabilities, most of them poor, most of them dependent on government services, and I try to convince government officials and insurance company lawyers that they ought to think before cutting off services to poor, needy people with disabilities. It is harder work than you think.
I am from the black-dirt suburbs around Dallas. We lived in a trailer park when I was little, on the outskirts of town. My dad was a preacher at a little country church just off the new interstate highway. He got tired of being poor and did something about it, and he and my mom got their master’s degrees in teaching and spent their careers teaching poor kids in work-study projects. I went to school and then to law school and decided to be a junior politician; that lasted ten years or so before I found out that I wasn’t quite up to taking the next step, whatever that was. I decamped from Texas and ended up in Atlanta, which was the style at the time.
I married a Jersey girl and now live in a red-dirt rural town north of Princeton. I drive to work every day on two-lane country roads through Garden State farmland, dodging Lance Armstrong wannabees on bicycles with twee little yellow windshirts. I have twin daughters that know that Daddy wrote some books, but not “Rainbow Fairy” books, so they’re not important.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’m not fascinated by books. Are fish fascinated by water? Books just are; I’ve always had something to read somewhere. Even when I was living in a basement apartment in Atlanta, eating ramen noodles and cold pizza, I had money for books, and when I didn’t have money, I went to the library. Books are a part of the ecosystem.
I got the idea for the first big project I wrote in 2001, right around the time of 9/11, although it didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, it was just a coincidence. I’d been writing movie reviews online for a few years, and was getting good at it, and I thought I could do something else for awhile. It was about baseball–the concept was that a modern-day player was getting close to breaking Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. It was a good book, or at least I thought so, but I couldn’t get it published and really it needed a lot of work that I couldn’t manage to do at that time. (You won’t ever get to read that one, sadly. I can’t even re-work it. I wrote the silly thing before the social media revolution, and social media totally permeates sports media now, so you’d have to tear it all down and build it back up again and that’s more work than I want to do.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
The first author I ever remember getting excited about was Tom Clancy–I loved that the stories took place over this huge canvas, using all this new technology and that the good guys always won. But most of the techno-thriller genre is played out, or else it’s dominated by people who can’t write that well, I transitioned into military historical fiction, mostly because of Patrick O’Brian, but I also love the Flashman series, and Hornblower, and of course anything Bernard Cornwell writes.
But the best writer living is Mark Helprin, and I’ll stand in my cowboy boots on Phillip Roth’s coffee table and say that.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
After my second book got rejected by literally every conceivable agent that could have rejected it, I decided to junk the idea of writing a novel and spend a little time writing short stories. I was able to get a few of them published on the McSweeney’s website, which cheered me up no end. What nobody tells you, though, is that once you start programming your mind to write that way, you kind of keep doing it. And McSweeney’s didn’t take everything I wrote (although I have a better hit rate than most people, or I think so). So I had a lot of short stories on my blog, and then when I put together my author website, I transitioned them over there.
So I was interviewing for this job–a job I was pretty confident I was going to get–and I got called in for a third interview, and the guy I was interviewing with started quoting me stuff I had written on my author website. Long story short: I didn’t get the job I wanted because this guy willfully misread something I’d written. So I decided to convert my author website to a personal resume website, and that meant that all the short stories had to go… somewhere.
So I put them together in a short story collection, LIES I HAVE TOLD, which is up on Amazon, and isn’t selling particularly well. But the stories are good, and you can read them, and tell me whether you liked them, and I wish you would.
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