Featured Interview With Dawn Lee McKenna
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised all over Florida, then moved to Tennesee. I live in a town that’s big enough to have a Japanese restaurant, but small enough that you’ll see someone you know there.
I have five incredible kids, two of whom are grown and live just a few blocks away.
I’ve been working as a non-fiction ghostwriter for the last five years, but I’m hoping that 2015 is the year that I can make the move to writing my fiction fulltime.
I am an irredeemable romantic with a tendency to fall in love with Literary Dead Guys. They may be authors or characters, but they’re all entirely enchanting.
I’m also a coffee addict, a flawed but optimistic Christian, a clutz and a cancer survivor.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I don’t remember ever not reading. I gave up kids’ books when I was about eight and discovered Earl Stanley Gardner and Ian Fleming. Yeah. Then I fell headlong in love with Southern writers like Faulkner and Harper Lee and Erskine Caldwell.
I started writing stories when I was really little. But I lived at the movies. They were my sanctuary. So I started writing my own sanctuaries and finished my first screenplay when I was twelve. I wrote four more, bt I chickened out of a screenwriting/acting career. I didn’t want to be in Hollywood. I wanted a quiet, simple life. So I switched to novels.
Fiction was really really hard for me. I’m all about dialogue and creating narrative that I was happy with was a struggle. I wrote a romance novel back in the nineties, but it was just for fun and practice.
I finally found that writing in my own, slightly peculiar voice was the key. When I stopped trying to sound like a book, everything clicked.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I read a really eclectic array of books and authors. I love Elisabeth Berg and Sue Monk Kidd. I think T.R. Pearson is the finest Souther writer today. I’m somehwat in love with Dave Robicheaux, so I’ve read all of those books from James Lee Burke.
When I want to be entertained, I’ll read a good thriller or legal thriller. I’m really enjoying a fellow indie and hometown boy, Scott Pratt. Great legal thrillers. But my true love will always be Southern fiction, in it’s various iterations.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I just published my debut novel, “See You.”
It’s set in present-day, rural Alabama and is a story about two people named Jack & Emma. Emma was raised by her grandmother and so was Jack, twenty years earlier. He was the best friend of Emma’s dead father.
When Emma was growing up, Jack only came home once or twice a year, on leave from the Marine Corp, but Emma managed to fall in love with him, or at least with an idealized version of him.
The grandmother passes away ten years before the book begins and Jack never comes home again after that. At the start of the book, Emma is in her grandmother’s house, raising her own little girl. Jack comes home, initially just for a couple of days, and eneds up staying.
Very early in the story, Jack lets Emma know that he’s got myostatic astrocytoma, a brain tumor, and that he’s expected to be dead within a year. But he has a plan to hep Emma and her little girl and that plan involves him staying there in the house where both he and Emma grow up.
Jack also has a secret, a secret he swore to Emma’s grandmother that he would never tell Emma.
The story is about making a conscious choice to allow something to break your heart, because it’s so worth having, even for just a little while. It’s also about redemption and forgiving yourself.
It sounds like a sad tale, but there’s an awful lot of humor and joy and it’s also hugely romantic. Readers tell me they often laughed and cried at the same time, and that’s the best compliment they could give me.
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