Donn Taylor Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about who Donn Taylor is.

A. From several back covers: Donn Taylor led an Infantry rifle platoon in the Korean War, served with Army aviation in Vietnam, and worked with air reconnaissance in Europe and Asia. Afterwards, he completed a PhD degree at The University of Texas and taught English literature at two liberal arts colleges. Before his latest novel, Rhapsody in Red, he published a suspense novel, The Lazarus File (spies and airplanes in the Caribbean), and the poems he published in various journals over the years are collected in his book Dust and Diamond: Poems of Earth and Beyond. He is a frequent speaker for writers’ groups and has taught poetry writing at the Glorieta and Blue Ridge conferences. He and his wife live near Houston, where he writes fiction, poetry, and articles on current topics.

Q: Could you give us the highlights of your professional writing career including how you got your first writing break?

A. After I left the academic world I turned to writing poetry and, somewhat later, suspense fiction. A local writers’ group taught the basics of commercial fiction, and I began work on a suspense novel, The Lazarus File. One member of the group was Guida Jackson, who has eighteen books to her credit. She heard me read two chapters of Lazarus, and a few years later, when she founded Panther Creek Press, she contacted me about publishing it. Released in 2002, the book received good reviews but suffered the distribution problems common to small regional presses. My poetry had been published in a number of journals, and I began teaching poetry at writers’ conferences like Glorieta and Blue Ridge. Conferees began asking me if I had a book of poems, so I published Dust and Diamond with Winepress in 2008. I met my agent, Terry Burns, at an American Christian Writers’ conference, and he accepted the manuscript that became Rhapsody in Red. As an agent, Terry opened doors that I couldn’t, resulting in the contract for Rhapsody with Moody Publishers. I have to say that working with Terry and with Moody’s acquisition editor, Andy McGuire, has been a real pleasure.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release, Rhapsody in Red?

A. Rhapsody in Red is a light-hearted mystery set on a college campus. The hero, if you can call him that, is a reclusive history professor who suffers from musical hallucinations. The heroine is a newly-hired professor of comparative religions, headstrong and determined to succeed on her own. When the two of them stumble on the body of a murdered colleague, police suspect them of the murder.

To clear themselves before the police can pin it on them, they have to find the real murderer. Though they’re incompatible and often in conflict, they have to find ways to work together. As they bend a few rules (to put it mildly), they get in trouble with the college administration and organized crime as well as the police.

So they find themselves in a race to see if they can find the murderer before they lose their jobs, their freedom, and perhaps their lives. -But the book is light-hearted in tone, and there’s a good bit of fun along the way.

Q: If your readers could take away only one message from Rhapsody in Red, what would that be?

A. Let’s be clear that the novel is written primarily to entertain. But embedded in the entertainment is the message that Christianity is the only religion that adequately explains the undeniable reality of evil.

Q: Rhapsody in Red has a unique plot that involves a professor who hears music and a Wiccan professor in a Christian college. How did you come up with this plot?

A. A number of things converged: I’d been planning to write about a reclusive professor who stays in trouble because he actually says the things many faculty would like to say but don’t dare. Then I read a newspaper article about musical hallucinations, researched it further, and decided afflicting my professor with them was a good way to give the novel interesting reinforcements and ironies. Historically, many Christian colleges tend to become more and more secular. Many of the smaller ones are pushed that way for economic survival. And, as a member of the National Association of Scholars, I’m aware of the ridiculous lengths to which colleges will go to further the “diversity” myth. So that’s how my Wiccan ended up on the religion faculty of a nominally Christian college.

Q: You write a college professor so realistically. How much of this character came from first hand experience and how much from research?

A. I taught in colleges for twenty years, most of it in private denominational colleges, so I know the territory with its various shibboleths and built-in conflicts of interest. However, no person I’ve ever known ever appears in my fiction. My history-professor hero is his own fictional self, but since I’m not a historian I had to give him a specialty close to something I knew a little bit about. That’s how he wound up specializing in Renaissance history of ideas.

Q: What inspires you to write?

A. To be completely honest, I have no idea. I only know that I’ve always felt driven to create something. In my teens it was classical music. Then I discovered literature and it became poetry and fiction. Fortunately or unfortunately, professional and family requirements postponed the creative writing for a number of decades. But now that I have time, I don’t think I could stop.

Q: How has being a published novelist differed from your expectations of the profession?

A: When I began seriously trying to write, I had no idea how much of the responsibility for publicity and sales fell on the writer. But by the time I actually published a novel, this had become clear to me. Thus it’s no surprise: it just comes with the territory.

Q: Would you share with us what you are working on now?

A. The current project is a sequel to Rhapsody in Red, further developing both protagonists and giving them a different kind of problem to solve.

Q. As a published author, what do you see as the greatest obstacle to becoming published today?

A. It’s a tossup between basic craftsmanship and finding something the market wants to buy. Both of these have to happen, and it takes time, patience, and growing pains to bring them about.

Q: Would you name three great fiction books you read in 2007 or 2008 and tell us why you think they were great?

A. Three very different choices here: 1. Gavin Lyall’s Spy’s Honour (St. Martin’s, 1993), a historical spy thriller set in Europe in 1912. Lyall has marvelous characters, excellent depth of detailed research, and a wonderfully convoluted plot.

2. Ernest Haycox’s Canyon Passage (1944; 1976), a classic western set in 1856 Oregon. Every line of Haycox’s dialogue either reveals character or advances the plot, and his brief descriptive passages are singularly beautiful. (It’s a good classic movie, too.)

3. Cathy Elliot’s A Vase of Mistaken Identity (Kregel), a very good contemporary cozy mystery. The book has a pleasing portrayal of small-town California life, and Thea (its protagonist) is a most likeable character. As the title suggests, the author’s love of adroit wordplay persists throughout the novel.

Q: What is something your readers might be surprised to learn about you?

A. In Heidelberg during the Cold War, I coached a basketball team of twelve-year-olds. Unfortunately, we won the league. That made me coach of the Heidelberg All-Stars, and I had to take fifteen twelve-year-olds on the Duty Train through the Iron Curtain to play the Berlin All-Stars. (We were lucky to get through East Germany without the kids starting a war.) We split four games 2-2. At the end of the four games there was one point difference in total score-in our favor, of course!

Q: Anything else you’d like to tell or share with us?

A. I love poetry, and believe it took a wrong turn about a century ago when poets began writing for smaller and smaller specialized audiences. Contrary to what’s being done in creative writing programs, I teach and encourage the writing of good-quality poetry that can be understood and enjoyed by ordinary educated readers. That’s also what I write in my collection Dust and Diamond, and if enough of us begin doing that we may be able to bring the rich experience of poetry back to ordinary readers. I’ve written about this idea at greater length on my Web site, www.donntaylor.com.