Featured Interview With Joshua Valentine
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in Merced – actually, a fifth generation Mercedian. My second-great grandparents from my mom’s side moved here in the early 1900s from the Azores; my dad’s family’s timeline in the Valley is a bit more mixed, but still broadly Central Valley based. I also received my High School diploma at Merced High School, my AA in Psychology at Merced Community College, and my BA in Psychology & Cognitive Science at UC Merced, which interestingly enough my dad was one of the sheet metal workers that helped build the latter’s library and science building. I currently live in Soquel, which is in the Santa Cruz foothills, while I go to UC Santa Cruz for my PhD program. I also do have a pet cat, a black one with a few spots of white, named Aurora.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve been fascinated with the thought of writing a book and actually printing it probably since at least the 3rd grade, but never started actually pursuing writing stories until the summer before the 5th grade. On my dad’s side, my Grandma Jane for as long as I could remember never left the house, and always ordered various items in bulk, as well as QVC items. Just stacks of boxes for her cats to crawl on. Well, near the litter box for her five cats, which was underneath an unused desk, she had a stack of spiral and composition notebooks always in the desk’s cabinet, and I remember one summer day about 10 years ago she was telling my mom and I about a writing contest for kids my age. I got right to writing, and wrote my first ever short story, an adaptation of the Poseiden story featuring a rabbit family in a hybrid rabbit hutch boat. It was a pretty dark story – I think at the end the rabbit daughter intentionally harms herself on the hutch-boat’s propellers. Needless to say, I never submitted the story for some reason, but that summer I wrote several short stories, and continued writing throughout the remainder of elementary and middle school, until I wrote my first self published novel Among Those You Know in the 8th and 9th grade. Never looked back, but also never made money or won anything for any of it (yet).
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
In elementary school, I really like the ‘Series of Unfortunate Events’ books by Lemony Snicket. I read all 13 books in the 5th grade, and actually didn’t read them in order – I started with #6, the Ersatz Elevator, which along with the Reptile Room and the Wide Window are my favorite ones. After reading books 3-6 of Harry Potter in my last year of middle school, we no longer had to read books for Accelerated Reader points, which basically was a school program where you read a book, take a quiz on it, and if you pass with 70% or more, you get points for a grade. Well, when it wasn’t required anymore, I found no interest in reading anymore, especially since we had so much more reading required in Pre-AP, which I didn’t actually read in depth that much, usually just skimmed. So, I didn’t read for leisure time until 2021 – so about 3 years of not reading books at all – when my friend Carly gifted me their heavily doodled copy of Daniel Dennett’s “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds”. I loved it so much, and from them on out I only take interest in reading non-fiction; to me, it’s so much easier to sink your teeth in them without feeling disappointed about the book ending. You learn so much information about niche areas of research/events that you can revisit every time, and learn something different. My favorite non-fiction genres include parapsychology/mainstream psychology, auto/biographies, and stuff of that nature. I really like Gina Rippon’s “Gender and Our Brains”, and recently I finished and really enjoyed Kai Bird’s biography on Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The only author I currently enjoy reading more than one book from is Bob Woodward, who was one of the original investigative journalists who uncovered the Watergate Scandal of the Nixon Administration. I really liked Peril, which I read a couple of months before the recent election, and am now reading War. It’ll be interesting if I ever revisit the first two books for his series on Trump’s first term. Also, I’d say it’s more so musicians/lyricists that inspire my writings. I’d have to credit Lady Gaga and Deee-Lite for inspiring my writing, in addition to the fashion component of my author personality. Lady Gaga for kind of the multi-faceted approach I take to expressing a single idea (fashion + literature + politics), and Deee-Lite for inspiring me to treat writing a story as also making a point, and a call to action for political change.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Somebody’s Dilemma is my recent book, which was actually first inspired by the book that got me out of my 3-year long reading dryspell. It’s a book about a person that is raised by a robotic mother in a dystopian future where most humans are extinct, except for the humans artificially raised by exploratory robots across the planet. He’s emotionally abused/neglected by the robot, and eventually when he’s abandoned by the mother for not meeting what the mother was programmed to consider a biological milestone, he runs away and is eventually kidnapped by a nomadic tribe of humans, who don’t speak English or any language he could potentially be familiar with. All of this happens as he is straddled with questions about what it means to be a human when your most important example of a human being isn’t even natural, and also if you can possibly miss something you’ve never had or experienced before.
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