Featured Interview With Terin Miller
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in St. Louis, Mo., but raised mostly in Madison, Wis. by two anthropology professors who taught at the University of Wisconsin and Beloit College. I live now in a suburban New Jersey town close enough to commute to Manhattan. I have lived and worked all over the world, including India and Spain, though most of my career as a journalist has been in Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, South Carolina and New York.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I first became interested in reading when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was at family friends’ farm, in Mt. Horeb, Wis., and it was night and there was no television (!) and too dark and cold to play outside, and I was bored, sitting in an old comfortable overstuffed green fabric wing-backed chair, and saw lying on the side table under a lamp a paperback copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I opened it and became immersed in the story, in my mind, and nearly instantly became a fan of reading books without pictures. I tried actually writing my first short story probably a year before, when I was about 7. It was (in my mind) to be an episode of The Mod Squad, my favorite television show at the time (yes, I’m that old). I typed it on an old portable manual Olivetti my parents let me play with, single spaced, and it took up the whole yellow ruled notebook page, with dialogue and setting and action. As the narrator, I took the role of Pete, while I put my friends in the role of Link and Julie. A girl I’d often played with at recess, who I was inexplicably attracted to, had long blonde hair parted in the middle and I imagined her as a young Peggy Lipton, the actress who played Julie in the original television series.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite authors are the “realists,” though I also am quite enamored with “naturalists,” especially Barry Holstun Lopez, and even some of the “romanticists” like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have read and enjoy everything from Science Fiction to Biographies to Historical novels to history and current affairs. I learn from books, as much likely as I learn from participating in things, which is my primary mode of education. As for inspiration, I first discovered Ernest Hemingway while at a friend’s log cabin for a week, where I and the boy whose father owned the cabin and several of our other friends started going for Thanksgiving every year from mid-high school into college. One of the guys was reading, I think, The Sun Also Rises, and all I knew of Hemingway is what everyone talked about–what an overly macho, sexist, boorish individual he was. In short, I thought, we had some things in common. And then, I read the book my friend had brought. What attracted me was the simple yet poetic language, and the seemingly understated emotions that somehow conveyed stronger emotions in the reader. I met Barry Lopez as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin branch campus at Stevens Point, and had the pleasure of stopping the car for him at the edge of the woods between the airport at Wausau, where I picked him up to drive him to campus as an assignment/instruction from my adviser in Communications, a friend of his, and the campus. He had endured a rather difficult flight, I guess from Oregon, and declared he needed some fresh air. I thought, of course, he was being “artsy,” and was immediately unpleased with him as a passenger. But I got out of the car with him, and walked with him, in the quiet on the snow covered ground between tall poplars and pines, careful not to disturb him. He walked ahead of me, fingers of both hands interlaced except for the index fingers, with which he formed a temple steeple, and put to his lips, his head down, almost in reverent prayer, as we walked. Then, as suddenly as we started, he stopped, and turned to face me. “Did you notice anything?” he asked, the glint I now recognize whenever I see his eyes, smiling from ear-to-ear under his beard and mustache “Like what?” I asked. It was sunny and the reflection off the snow made me squint, so I’d been looking at his back. He pointed behind me, with his index fingers still in a steeple. “Deer spoor,” he said, and I looked. Deer must have been where we’d passed shortly before us, as the droppings were still giving off steam. “It’s amazing what you can see,” he taught me, “when you are actually looking.” So, it’s fair to say Barry has inspired me in my writing since my college days. And then, I met Loren D. Estleman in Texas. Loren, a mystery and western writer, was pretty much beginning his career at the time. We shared the same literary agent, who urged me to introduce myself to him at a conference being held at the time in Amarillo, where I was working at my first newspaper. Loren has remained a good friend, confidant and mentor. Besides them, and Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, I’ve read and enjoyed Hugh Mottram, and everyone from the french writers Prevost, Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, to Dickens, Conrad, Hawthorne, Irving, Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Norman Mailer, James Jones to Truman Capote, with a host of friends inbetween, to the Russians Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Turgenev to Mihail Lehrmontov (my favorite) to Juan Benito Perez Galdos, the so-called accurately “Spanish Balzac,” to for pure fun Isaac Assimov, Herman Hesse, Pohl Anderson to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Washington Irving, Herman Mellville, R.H. Dana, Jack London and J.G. Farrell. I have, as my parents would say, rather “eclectic” tastes. Oh. And I also LOVE poetry. Poetry that causes my nerves to hum, like my friend Keith Flynn, and Robert Frost, Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, and, despite the rhyme, Archibald MacLeish. For mysteries, besides Estleman, I love Dashiell Hammett, Micky Spillane, Jim Thompson, Ross MacDonald and, lately, Marie Belloc Lowndes.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Sympathy for the Devil is essentially a combination of my love for mysteries with a bit of the hard-bitten detective turned into instead a hard-bitten, aging journalist. I try to describe the harsh Texas Panhandle landscape as a character that has shaped the people who have lived for generations on it. It is part historical novel, as it takes place in the area in the 1980s, and the narrator is a native of the Panhandle who “won the lottery” to Southeast Asia to fight in Vietnam at just about the time he might have, instead, gone to college on a basketball scholarship. Charles Lawton is a “good ol’ boy” on the outside, but inside, he’s still resentful of being taken from everything he knew as a high school basketball star, and taught to kill as a member of a Military Assistance Command-Vietnam long range reconnaissance patrol unit, Ranger and sniper qualified, and then back home. In short, he is a contemporary with most of the people he’s dealing with as a journalist–politicians, law enforcement officers, ranchers, and others. But only really of others who were Vietnam Veterans in Texas in the 1980s, dealing with modernization and liberation and money-making and a country trying to put the war behind it just like everyone else at the time.
Yes, the characters–including the narrator, Lawton, are based on people I knew and experiences I had while a police reporter in the region for three years. It took me probably about a decade to write it the way I wanted to, and I brought it out of retirement and went over some of it with friends from the region at the period it takes place and revised it and the publisher edited it and published it about a year ago. One writer friend and I have discussed in the past how much time should be allowed between experiences and writing about them, well, and his response and reaction was “a decade, at least.” The reason I went into journalism in the first place was to have experiences and be able to write about them. I’ve been a journalist more than three decades. I’ve lived and had and heard a lot of experiences. I only hope I have enough time to write about most of them.
Connect with the Author on their Websites and Social media profiles