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 Mark Guerin Interviewed by Suanne Schafer
Schafer's questions elicit thoughtful, honest, colorful responses from Mark Guerin. Here are a couple of small samples.
SS: Have you made any literary pilgrimages?
MG: In college, a group of us student writers went to Oxford, Mississippi, the hometown of William Faulker, visited his big, drafty old house, and touched his ancient typewriter. From that amazing setting, with all the Live Oaks and the Spanish Moss hanging everywhere, it was clear those novels could not have been written anywhere else. While there, I shook the hand of Eudora Welty upon receiving a prize for best undergraduate poem in the nation. It was all pretty cool for a young college kid.
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SS: What would a fly on the wall see if he watched you while you are writing?
MG: Me, with a laptop in my lap, pounding away, scratching my head, pulling at my beard, then pounding away again.
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SS: Do you ever incorporate something that happened to you in real life into your novels?
MG: My novel is semi-biographical, based on my teenaged years living in a small factory town in northern Illinois. It’s about how my father, a former Air Force colonel, doctor and hospital commander ended up working at an automobile plant doing physicals and handling worker’s comp claims, and how his hatred of that job affected his family – and me, as his son. My novel starts with those facts and then speculates, in fiction, as to how this all came to be and how a father and son relationship in this situation might evolve. So, yes, my novel very heavily incorporates my real life into its fictional narrative.
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SS: Which scene did you find the most challenging to write and why?
MG: The protagonist’s confrontations with his father and discussions with his friends about his father’s abuses were difficult to write because they were based on my memories of my father. Getting at those truths is tough to do without being overly sentimental or, conversely, failing to address the emotional heart of the matter. Being emotionally honest is never easy, especially when it is based on your own life.
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SS: What’s something memorable you’ve heard from your readers/fans? What’s been the best compliment?
MG: I’ve heard from a number of readers how my depiction of the father/son relationship in my book resonated with them and made them wonder what was going on in their own fathers’ lives that made them drink or become abusive. If my book helps some readers see their fathers in a new, perhaps more forgiving light, then that’s the best compliment they could give me.
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SS: What kind of research did you think you had to do? How much was actually needed?
MG: I felt like I had to be accurate about immigration law in 1974 and 2004, and about automobile assembly plants, how they work and are managed, how management interacted with unions in those days, and on the medical condition and deterioration one of the characters undergoes. I also did a lot of research on the Braceros program one of the immigrant characters went though in the 50s and 60s that allowed Mexican migrant workers to work legally in the US for a while. All of that was needed. Outside those legal and technical issues that required factual accuracy to be believable, I didn’t do much research.
SS: Where and when is your book set? How did you decide on the setting? The time frame?
MG: The book is set in northern Illinois in 1974 and 2004. The 1974 timeline was based on my summer job at an automobile assembly plant in 1974. The 2004 timeline was based on an automobile accident my real-life father had when he was 94 and his hospitalization during that time. For plot reasons, I needed the characters to live in a large city rather than the small town I actually lived in at that time, so I created the fictional city of Belford, which is a mashup of the real town of Belvidere, Illinois, and its much larger neighbor, Rockford, Illinois. |
Golden Antelope Press 
