Featured Interview With Robert R Randall
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
As my new memoir, Lost in the 50s: in Meridian, Mississippi, will attest, I was born and raised in the deep South. After four years in the Air Force and just enough education to be dangerous (an MS in mass communications from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette), I spent ten years as an itinerant disc jockey and TV sports anchor before I became an advertising copywriter. My wife, Ann, 2 cats called Zeus and Nicholas, a dog named Lucki and I live happily in beautiful San Antonio.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was an avid reader in my teens, but I was almost thirty before I wrote my first short story for a college magazine. Wish I had started sooner, but c’est la vie, n’est-ce pas?
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I still love the classic American authors–Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Robrt Penn Warren. In more recent times, I am greatly impressed by Richard Russo, Kate Atkinson, Donna Tartt, Richard Ford and Annie Proulx, just to name a few.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
A few years ago, wrote a fictionalized version of my formative and adolescent years called The Great Pretender: Confessions of a Semi-Incorrigible Southern Catholic Boy. This time, I cut to the chase with a unabashed memoir. Lost in the 50s: in Meridian, Mississippi focuses on those teen years in which ‘BobbyRandall’ (in the South they often run your first and last names together) suffers the pangs of adolescence-from young romance to raging hormones and a wildly dysfunctional family. It’s a fun book.