Featured Interview With E.H. Barrett
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I'm E.H. Barrett. I came to Canada when I was nine, and I live in Toronto now with my wife and our two kids, and our dog, who gets me out on the walks where I do most of my thinking. I worked as an animator, and I've always loved telling stories.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
When I came to Canada at nine I could barely read, and I had these old original Winnie-the-Pooh books. The one where Eeyore loses his tail has stayed with me ever since. I've been writing since I was a kid; I was always writing stories, and I read Stephen King's On Writing when I was younger because I wanted to be a writer. What I could never do was keep my ideas organized. Working with AI, ChatGPT in my case, changed that.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love biographies, and I listen to them over and over. Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs is a great one, because of the way he gets inside what makes someone who they are. Right now I'm listening to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman. Ironically, I know. Stephen King is the other one: The Dark Tower, and On Writing, which has definitely influenced me.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Rose Petal. I wanted a story that was completely contained: one small space, one conversation. A train felt like the right place for it. A man meets a woman across the aisle. At first it's almost flirtation, but it turns into her questioning his whole way of life. Then I started asking the same question: why is he like this? That led me to his parents, and the deeper I went, the more it mirrored my own life and my relationship with my parents, especially my dad. So there's a lot of me in it. In some ways I'm that unnamed man, and in some ways I'm his opposite. It took me about a month or two, maybe longer. I was thinking about it every day, on walks with my dog, coming home and writing a bit. The last few weeks were me reading the whole book, chapter by chapter, and cutting big parts that didn't work for the story I wanted.
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