Featured Interview With Victor D. López
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Queens, New York from the age of 9 and lived in NYC until my wife and I married, then moved upstate New York. I now split my time between Otsego County upstate New York and Long Island. My wife and I have no pets currently, though we both love dogs. As a child, I had a dog and canaries as pets.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve loved books even before I learned to read, which I did long before attending school. My mom would read to me and I loved the full-color illustrations in fairytale books, Disney books and even illustrated classics like the Odyssey. I would look at these on my own, making up stories based on the illustrations—especially if I did not like stories that did not end as I would have liked. Even the smell of books always fascinated me. It still does—nothing like a hardcover book right off the presses read late at night and into the wee hours of the morning under warm blankets.
I started writing poems and fiction before middle school. My mom was a wonderful storyteller and fueled my imagination. Some of my earliest memories involve mom reading bedtime stories to me or making up her own. I remember crying at the age of one or two when I did not like the ending of the stories she read to me—Little red Riding Hood comes to mind—so mom would have to change the story so that it ended well. I’ve always been a happily ever after kind of guy. Ironically, that is seldom reflected in my own fiction or poetry. I have cousins on two continents who are psychologists and psychiatrists—some day I should consult them about that.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have very broad, eclectic tastes in both fiction and non-fiction that include science, law, politics, philosophy, drama, literary fiction, speculative fiction, science fiction, poetry and so much more. My light reading is primarily in the science fiction genre—both hard and soft varieties. There are so many authors that have influenced and inspired me to write that it is hard to mention just a few. In poetry, the English romantic poets are by far my favorites, especially Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, and Coleridge (and, besides the Romantics, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope). In speculative fiction, Poe, Koontz, and King, are among my favorites. In fantasy, Zelazny, Norton, Le Guin, McCaffrey, George RR Martin, Frank Herbert, Goodkind, and Brooks. In science fiction Clarke, Asimov, Niven. Pournelle, Anderson, Dick, Heinlein, Barnes, Cherryh, and so many others. In law, primarily William Rehnquist, Benjamin Cardozo and Antonin Scalia. In philosophy primarily Plato and Aristotle and the more than two thousand years of reaction they engendered with their competing philosophies. I will never hold a candle to any of my literary heroes—chief among them my mom who with only a few years of primary school education (she began working full time at the age of 11 to help feed her family after her dad died in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War) was to my inferior talent as the sun is to a candle..
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is actually my first novel, Hire Lernin’: An Idealist’s Quest Through the Realm of for-Profit Education. It centers on a bright, naïve young lawyer who accepts a position as academic dean of a for-profit business school in New York City in the 1980s knowing next to nothing about the industry. He soon finds that the profit-centered mission of the institution clashes with his personal need to change lives for the better. Undaunted, he launches a mission to change the way things are, ignoring the advice that it is a fool’s journey. What follows is a year of unprecedented success, life-altering failure and critical life lessons learned about his strengths and weaknesses leadership by example, the failings of higher education and love. The book is fiction inspired by my experience early in my academic career and offers a rare look behind the curtain of for-profit education that only a former insider can provide.
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