Featured Interview With Richard R Becker
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised by my grandparents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin after my father was killed in a car accident. They were poor and my grandmother suffered with cancer. Just before she died, I was relocated to live with my mother and her new family in Burnsville, Minnesota, and later Las Vegas. I left Las Vegas to attend school, but fate led me back. I don’t have any pets because my daughter is a travel softball player, but I’m pretty sure I will have a dog someday.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
While I was always a storyteller, I wasn’t always a writer. I was more of an artist. I told stories with drawings and struggled as a reader. Things started to change in junior high school when my reading teacher introduced me to Dune by Frank Herbert because I aced my book report by picking the thinnest book in the library. It was in junior high that I also started writing some poetry and wrote a serial for the school newspaper. Aside from that, it wasn’t until college that I learned to write well.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
At first, I started reading John Jakes and Sidney Sheldon because they were on my mother’s bookshelves, but then I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Lloyd Alexander, and Roger Zelazny. By high school, I felt like I cheated myself somehow and started reading all the classics I had missed in between science fiction and horror novels. Nowadays, my reading is eclectic like my writing. I do have an affinity for Hemmingway and Updike, but I’m told my style is more like a mix between David Baldacci and Heather Graham.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
50 States is a debut collection of 50 short stories that take place across the American landscape over the last 60 years — the kind and the cruel, the heroic and the criminal. Each story is set in a different state. This idea originally evolved out of a project to write 50 stories in 50 weeks.
While there is no set genre, all of the stories are character-driven. There is a farmer who is snapped out of his self-imposed reclusive prison, an alcoholic vigilante, a secret witness protection enrollee, a man gifted with the ability to see alternate destinies, and a few runaways. Most, though, are people like those you meet every day, with secret joys or pains that we never notice.
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