Donn Taylor Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself.

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. His mystery novel Rhapsody in Red and his suspense novel The Lazarus File (spies and airplanes in the Caribbean) received excellent reviews. 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. His current teaching crusade is to promote the writing of good-quality poetry that’s accessible to ordinary readers. He and his wife live near Houston, where he writes fiction, poetry, and articles on current topics.

Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

A. Creating things just seems to be part of my genetic code. I began writing music at age 14. Two years later I entered college as a music major, studied piano with an instructor on leave from Cincinnati Conservatory and played some of my classical compositions in her recitals. But at age 18 I got interested in poetry—the Romantics, of course—and began writing poetry and some very bad short stories. Since then, writing is just something I have to do, though there have been long periods when job and family requirements pushed it far into the background.

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

A. After I retired from teaching I began writing the kind of serious poetry I enjoyed teaching, but trying to keep it accessible to ordinary readers. I also joined a local writers’ group and (with the group’s help) began teaching myself to write commercial fiction. One group member was Guida Jackson, who has eighteen books to her credit. She heard me read two chapters of The Lazarus File to a critique group. Later, she opened a small regional publisher, Panther Creek Press, and offered to publish Lazarus. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. Later, Lazarus went out of print, but Guida returned the rights to me and it’s now available as an e-book from Lighthouse Publishers of the Carolinas. Somewhat later, Andy Maguire (then an editor at Moody Publishers) told my agent, Terry Burns, he was looking for a mystery writer that was more than genre but less than literary. Terry submitted my ms, and Moody published Rhapsody in Red.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release, Deadly Additive?

A. It’s a remote sequel to Lazarus. It begins with a Colombian kidnapping but expands into problems with the international black market in weapons and a threat to the global balance of power posed by illicit sales of a new and deadly type chemical weapon. But it’s not all suspense. Readers who met the character Ramon in Lazarus will find similar humor in his son Raul in Deadly Additive. And both hero and heroine in the novel find they have intellectual and spiritual problems to solve as well as questions about chemical weapons. (Read my review of Deadly Additive.)

Q: Where did you get your inspiration for Deadly Additive?

A: To be honest, it was less inspiration than perspiration. The question was where to go after Lazarus. The answer was to build a new story on the same research base. But beyond that, I was fed up with wild stories about global threats from nuclear weapons. I studied those weapons while on active duty, and I concluded that the more probable threat came from chemical weapons—just as deadly as nukes, but more local and manageable in their effects. (Biological weapons are more deadly, but their effects are not manageable.) So I just built the story from those beginnings.

Q: What is the main thing you hope readers remember from this story?

A: First of all, fiction is entertainment. If the reader wants instruction, he should read nonfiction. But although fiction cannot prove anything, it can illustrate and explain substantive concepts. In that light, I hope readers will remember the discussion in which someone tells the hero that risking his life in noble causes will in itself never be enough to satisfy the longing within him. There has to be an overall intellectual, moral, and spiritual belief that gives the heroic deeds their ultimate meaning. With that hint, I’ll leave the reader to find the discussion it in the novel and evaluate it for his own thought.

Q: What is your favorite scene/chapter from the book?

A: I don’t think I have one. But if I must choose, it would probably be two characters’ ingenious method of getting through Colombian guerrilla roadblocks.

Q: What inspires you to write?

  A. It is just something I have to do. It’s been that way ever since I can remember, though job and family requirements have pushed it into the background for years at a time.

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

A: I did not expect the publishers to dump so much of the promotion activity onto their authors. I don’t like it any more than other authors do, but I have to live with it.

Q: What advice or tips do you have for writers who are just getting started?

A: Three important items of advice. The first is patience: it always takes longer than you think it’s going to. Much longer. Second, learn the craft: don’t be too proud or too stubborn to learn basic rules of grammar and punctuation. Third, if you’re driven to write, keep writing: even if you’re never published, it will bring a great deal of satisfaction.

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

  A. My agent is shopping around a sequel to Rhapsody in Red. I’m writing a sequel to the sequel, and also researching possible sequels to Deadly Additive.

Q: When you’re not writing what do you like to do?

A. In a prior incarnation before the wheels came off, I played competitive basketball and ran 10Ks. Now I spend time with my wife. Mildred has been and is my constant inspiration. She’s been fighting ovarian cancer for six years now, mostly (with the Lord’s help) successfully. We record classic movies and watch them after supper. At meals we have punning sessions in which she defeats me roundly

Q: Where can readers find you on the internet?

A. Several places: www.donntaylor.com, www.facebook.com/DonnTaylor, www.facebook.com/authordonntaylor, and on Twitter I’m DonnTaylor3.

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.