Featured Interview With Gerrald Mccollister
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in Oregon and worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 17 years, eight of those on the Zigzag Hotshot Crew. I served 2 years in the U.S. Peace Corps in Guatemala where I live now with my Guatemalan wife and daughter and our pet chiweenie.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I read quite often even before high school. When I took creative writing class 9 times in high school and began writing for my high school newspaper, I had an idea that this was the direction that I wanted to go.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I grew up reading Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kingsley Amis, etc. I appreciated the dialogue in many of Shakespeare tragedies. So I read a lot of fiction and it was easy to apply much of it to daily life. I don’t think that there is one author that inspires me the most, as much as a culmination of all of the books that I have read.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Flavors of the East Highlands of Guatemala is a record of many recipes from the women of the east highland community where I live, including recipes of my wife that she inherited from her mother. There needed to be a collection of some of these recipes written down for posterity sake. The same goes for my first book Born to the Flame: La Casa Monte. A book of real life experience as a forest fire fighter. I had to record these experiences as well, while the memory of them are still at the forefront.
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