Featured Interview With Mark R. Harris
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Lexington, Kentucky, moved to New Jersey as a small boy, and met my in college in Pennsylvania. We stayed on in our little Pennsylvania town after college until I got my first teaching job, in Bristol, Virginia, down on the Virginia/Tennessee border. I now teach in central Virginia, where I live with my wife and sons, as well as our border collie / yellow lab mix dog Emma and our cat Betty.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
When I was a kid I liked listening to stories—my dad would tell me stories from the Greek myths, like the one about how Odysseus tricked the Cyclops. I listened to stories on the radio too—a New York City radio station did mystery stories in the evening, and Jean Shepherd would spin these humorous stories of him and his buddies on that same station, WOR in New York. I actually tried to write a novel when I was maybe 11 or 12 and sent it to I think it was Random House. Didn’t get published, but hey, at least I tried. As a teenager I got into comic books, and that was my main story reading in those years. In my late teens and into college, I started writing songs, as well as some poetry and stories. I started to get into books in college as well, and eventually I majored in English. My first publication was actually an article on Mark Twain, which came out when I was in grad school. Later I kept starting writing novels but could never seem to finish them. I finally succeeded last year, and now my first novel is published!
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Wow, I like so many authors. A lot of classic lit. Faulkner, Welty, Shakespeare, Cather, Hawthorne, Wharton are some favorites of mine. There’s probably some of their various styles in my writing. I like poetry, short fiction, novels, plays, prose poems….Pretty much all periods of literature (well, 18th-century British might be my least favorite, but even there I like Jonathan Swift). Music inspires my writing a lot too, classic rock from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
• My novel Fire in the Bones follows Luke, an American boy plagued by panic and loneliness growing up in a nominally religious middle class family. He looks for security and companionship wherever he can, first through daydreams, including a relationship with an imaginary friend named Bob, and then on to sixties pop culture, via TV icon Batman and pop music sensations the Beatles. As Luke comes to pattern his identity after the Beatles and others, he creates a fantasy world for himself that keeps the panic and loneliness at bay. But when Lonnie walks into his life, he enters a new reality where a flesh-and-blood female offers him tangible security—but at a price Luke may not be willing to pay.
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