Featured Interview With Richard Ferguson
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I live in Michoacan, Mexico with Hamish and Poochie, four-legged friends I saved from the streets one way or another. My novels include Blue’s Point, a hard-hitting thriller set in a racist town, and Oiorpata, a cold-war spy thriller. Spirit Runner, my latest novel, is the closest thing to an autobiography I’ve ever written. Many of the things that happen to Ron Campbell in the story actually happened to me. I can’t really say too much about that without giving things away, but Curly the bull was real and just like in the story. You could probably still find your way around on my grandfather’s ranch from the descriptions of it. I ran for the University of Texas and still compete in fun runs now. I was injured in the Army and it took six years to get back to running again.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I still have the first short story I wrote when I was five. In it, a boy finds an injured prairie dog. He takes it home and nurses it back to health. Either I appreciated surprise endings at an early age or I had a short attention span because he then takes it to the ocean and throws it in where it lives happily ever after.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I don’t enjoy genres as much as I do great writers. Ken Kesey, who I once met and got to know some, wrote a wonderful book in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When people ask what books I liked most, I have to include The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay (which was somewhat of an inspiration for Spirit Runner), and many others. Those just came to mind first.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Spirit Runner won an award from the Reader’s Favorite International Novel Contest as one of the best books of 2018.
When he is seven, Ron Campbell loses everything: his family, his home, even his ability to walk. As he grows from seven to twenty, the only things that sustain him are his indomitable spirit and his friends. His dream is to be an Olympic marathoner like his father was.
The odds against him are enormous. The relatives he must live with would rather see him dead. First, he must crawl. Next, he must walk. Then, he must run and train, all the while matching wits with deadly foes.
Ron, Emil, and Dovey become the three musketeers of the Mogollon in a tale of grit, fun, love, and suspense.
I couldn’t zip through this book as quickly as I have spy thrillers that I’ve written in the past. I wanted to get all the details exactly right and, because I’d actually lived a great deal of it, I proceeded carefully. It took about a year and a half.
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