Featured Interview With Mary T. Wagner
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Chicago, but have lived in Wisconsin for all the rest of my life except for one year. I now live in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where I’ve worked as a part-time state prosecutor since 2000. I absolutely love it here because I’m close to the Lake Michigan shore. Before that I had combined my first career of journalism with being a soccer mom to four kids. Come to think of it, I was still able to keep the “soccer mom” thing going until they were all out of the house! It’s been quite the journey, and I’ve written a lot about it in my “best of” essay collection WHEN THE SHOE FITS. I used to have two horses when I still lived in the country, but they have both passed to that great clover meadow in the sky. I currently have a border collie mix named Lucky who keeps me eternally on my toes, and two cats, Smokey and Mookah. Mookah’s currently sitting in my lap, “helping” me do this interview!
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve always been a reader. I joke that when I was younger I read my way through childhood in Chicago, wearing grooves in the pavement between my house and the local library. I brought home every book on horses for years, and then graduated to Regency Romances and Romantic Suspense by authors like Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney. But I was never a kid who “knew” that they wanted to be a writer. I sort of fell into it in college, when I decided to give journalism a try. I was hooked literally from the first basic reporting class. Reporting was basically a free pass to ask anyone about anything in a given situation, and I really valued that! After I got married and started a family, we were living in the country and I started to write freelance magazine and newspaper features about public television shows from my house. Then I had a REALLY bad accident in 1995–I broke my back in a fall from a horse–and when I healed up, I changed directions and went to law school. I thought that my creative writing days were behind me, but a few years after I started working as a prosecutor, friends pushed me to start blogging and so my first website, “Running with Stilettos,” got started. And for the first time in my writing life I was completely off the leash and writing from the heart. It was great!
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have always said that if I had to be marooned on a desert island with one book, it would be Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca.” I’m always drawn to suspense, to a puzzle that needs solving. When it comes to writing about “real life,” I’ve always admired Anna Quindlen. But as for really scratching that “whodunnit” and “how come” itch, my favorite writers these days are William Kent Krueger with his “Cork O’Connor” series about a small town sometime-sheriff in “up north” Minnesota. Not only is the plotting great, his understanding of the intersections between nature and Native Americans and the white communities sprinkled through the woods and the reservations is mesmerizing. I also really like Bernard Cornwell’s set of sailing thrillers from a few decades back, even though he’s mostly known for historical fiction.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest project is a series of children’s chapter books that revolve around FINNIGAN THE CIRCUS CAT. Finnigan is a foundling kitten who gets rescued by eight-year-old Lucy Farnsworth and brought home to her family’s small town circus museum. He has to stay “under the radar” in the museum which is really an old barn, because Lucy’s father is allergic to cats. But a pair of “circus mice” cousins named Max and Leroy take him under their wing, and as time goes by, they become a circus family of their own despite their natural differences. There’s adventure, and slapstick, and narrow escapes, and discoveries galore in these stories.
The first book, which was published in 2016, won some nice literary awards, and the second book, FINNIGAN AND THE LOST CIRCUS WAGON, was just named a finalist in England’s Wishing Shelf Book Awards, where the children’s books are judged by actual kids and their teachers! The first book won a Bronze Award in the 2016 contest, so I’m on pins and needles to see how the second book does.
I got the idea for this series because two things intersected–my son and his wife adopted the REAL Finnigan as a very tiny kitten from an animal shelter, and one of my daughters is a contemporary circus aerialist, so the subject of “circus” is all around me! And I ended up drawing the pictures inside the books that begin every chapter, even though it wasn’t in my original plan. But a friend dared me to do it, and after a while I remembered that when I was a kid in my “horse obsession” phase I drew horses all the time. So I went to kids’ section of the library, took out a bunch of books about how to draw cats and other animals, and set to work. It was quite a challenge. In the second book, which involves a decrepit circus wagon with a mysterious past, I actually drew some of the pictures in the book from real circus wagons on display at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
I’m now working on the third volume of the series, FINNIGAN THE LIONHEARTED. In that one, Finnigan, Max and Leroy will get to see an actual tent circus perform when it comes to town. And after making friends behind the scenes with the big cats, Finnigan will have to channel his “inner lion” to be very brave in an unexpected way.
Connect with the Author on their Websites and Social media profiles
Mary T. Wagner Twitter Account
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