Harvest is a collection of six short stories that take readers on a journey of growing up and survival. What was the inspiration for the setup of this collection of stories?

Harvest takes its name from the first story in the collection and also was the most difficult of the stories to write.  It is set in 1947 during the first grain harvest I worked on as a boy and was originally intended to be the first story in The Past We Step Into, my 2021 book for Atmosphere Press.  However, it was 75 years ago, and (1) I couldn’t remember all the technical requirements, plus (2) there were relatives of people whom I had used as character models who I was afraid of offending.  In The Past We Step Into, all twelve of the stories were connected in some way to my family history, and I wanted to have more options in Harvest.  I was helped by having already written “The Peacemaker” and “Change of Pace.”  Despite the difference in locale and storyline—the making of a television series in Oregon—“The Peacemaker” was still about a boy growing up, and “Change of Pace” was about a professional baseball player facing the need to change his profession as he approached thirty.  “The Bulbeaters” was family history again (not mine)—pioneers finding ways to survive in frontier Utah.  “Submitted for Your Consideration”(as the title might suggest) began as a tribute to Rod Serling and then developed along the lines of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, set this time in modern-day Utah.  We watch a man being persecuted in the present for reasons that are never given any explanation until the last line of the story.  “VICKI…and the whispering children” is my story again, but derived from hallucinations I had after being hospitalized for cancer in 2020.

Each character in these stories is unique and gives readers a thought-provoking experience to reflect upon. What were the morals you were trying to capture while creating your characters?

No character in any of the stories is presented as the personification of good or evil.  For example, the Hired Man in “Harvest” was convicted of statutory rape, deserted from the Army during wartime, and has a long history of sexual relations with married women.  And yet, more than any other, he is the person with whom we identify right up to the time that he is driven out of the community.  In the same story, two young farmers are brothers in every meaning of the word except blood relationship.  In “The Peacemaker,” the man who makes (and stars) in the television series has a questionable record from World War II and a weekend drinking problem yet drives himself to create an idealized art form right up to the moment when he drops dead.  The baseball pitcher and the actress in “Change of Pace” are truly in love but are separated by the art forms to which they have devoted their lives.  The seemingly ordinary neighborhood depicted in “Submitted for Your Consideration” persecutes a seemingly ordinary man endlessly until he volunteers to be incarcerated in a prison long ago disgraced.  In two different stories of “The Bulbeaters,” women do the heroic thing, and both die.  We may question the morality of the universe in which these characters live, but if my writing achieves its purpose, we will not question the morality of their actions.  

What experience in your life has had the biggest impact on your writing?

I am a farm boy (with some experience in the military) for whom an education and travel was unlikely.  Yet I taught college for fifty years, was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Poland, and a guest lecturer for more than ten years in the University of Utah London Study Abroad Program, as well as at the University of Utrecht, the University of Aarhus (Denmark), and the Korean National University of the Arts.  I also acted in seven foreign countries, wrote four books (two scholarly, two fiction), and published 25 essays.  I was lucky to be raised in a farmhouse where there were always books and magazines around.  My father, who had to leave school in the sixth grade when planting time came, told me that if I wanted to go to college, he would pay for it.  I had a teacher who suggested I go to graduate school, even though I didn’t know what it was.  I married a girl who not only deserved much better than me, but also went to graduate school with me, taught college, was a political organizer, a radio hostess, a key figure in the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and created a home for me where I only had to think about the academic interests I listed at the beginning of the paragraph.

I would like to make one more addition to the influences my family, my teachers, and my wife had on my writing.  I began writing fiction after my wife died in 2002, but I had mostly continued to focus on my teaching and my theatre work until I was diagnosed with cancer in 2020.  I got home at the end of April, physically unable to go out in the midst of a pandemic, during which it was unhealthy to go out.  What could I do?  I sat down in front of my laptop, reasoning that even if my writing was no good, I probably wouldn’t live long enough for anyone to read it.

I would not recommend these circumstances as a reason to write.

What is the next collection of short stories that you are working on, and when will it be available?

As I see it now, my next collection will be named after the opening story, “The Woman in the Third Floor Front,” and will have as its inspiration two events from my life: the semi-crippling of my legs; and the collapse of Southwest Airlines, which left me stranded for ten days last Christmas.  I suffered from cancer in 2020 and my central character had a motorcycle accident.  (I rode a motorcycle for 35 years before the coming of the cancer.)  The injury cost my protagonist his job as a writer for an adventure magazine, e.g., his most recent assignment was a trip to the Himalayas to interview a mountain climber.  He takes a plane to the city where his magazine is headquartered, only to be stranded in a relatively small-town in-between.  He is directed to a hotel run by a widow with a young son.  Her husband also had a motorcycle accident, but his was fatal.  The woman and the boy continue to occupy the third-floor family apartment, and as the days pass the writer becomes more and more interested in her story.  It is impossible for me to determine when this story or any of the following will be available, although my goal is 2025.

The second story is based upon the lives of Kathy and Elliot Lewis, two stars of the last days of Network Radio.  They acted, directed, produced, and wrote some of the finest radio theatre right up to its end in October 1954.  (Maybe because of my age, I am fascinated by artists who lose not their skill, but the place of their art in society.)  We will see in passing William Conrad—Matt Dillon on radio, Hans Conreid—who once acted in seven different programs in a week, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—who made the leap from supporting radio comedians to movie stars.  Incidentally, the Kathy and Elliot partnership did not long outlast Network Radio.  They divorced after 14 years of marriage in 1958 (unable to adapt to one another in changed roles?).

If I am to bring about the third story, I will need the help of my publisher.  You may or may not know Johnny Mercer, but you are likely to know songs like “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses.”  Johnny was a leading movie lyricist and writer of popular songs, as well as a successful radio and night club singer.  Have you ever seen Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?  Every song in it was written by Johnny Mercer, beginning and ending with “Skylark,” and including “Fools Rush In” and “That Old Black Magic.”  As a Savannah-born singer, Johnny is best measured by his 1943 radio show, during which a segregated high school voted Johnny “the best black singer in radio.”  He ended his career in the sixties and seventies singing his own songs in nightclubs, and that is where my story would be set.  Two things should be remembered: (1) Johnny had brain cancer late in his life; and (2) he had a love affair with Judy Garland that only ended with her death.  It wasn’t long after The Wizard of Oz that the 19-year-old Garland and the already-married Mercer fell in love.  MGM and her agent convinced Garland that it would ruin her career if she was seen as a marriage breaker, and she soon embarked upon the first of her five marriages.  They got together again in the late sixties just about the same time as Mercer’s wife came down with cancer.  She made them promise not to marry until she died, then outlived them both.  Mercer said his song, “I Remember You,” is the best expression of his feelings for Garland and that is the title of the story.  Johnny sings his own songs in a full nightclub, with Hoagy Carmichael—who wrote the music for some of them—at the piano, but sometimes forgets where he is and who is there with him.  Sometimes he sings to Garland, sometimes she sings to him, and sometimes they sing together.  The problem is copyrights.  Johnny rarely wrote his own music, and the question is whether the songs (whose music will not be in the story) will have to be cleared by the estate of each individual composer.

These three stories are probably book-length.  If they are not, or if one or more can’t be included, I have two earlier stories I would like to re-write.  In “When I go, I leave no trace,” a political reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune finds himself unwillingly doubling as an environmental reporter when the newspaper makes a sharp cutback in staff.  His first assignment is to cover the standoff in Oregon between the Bundy family refusing to pay grazing fees on federal land, and governmental agents.  That night on the wall of the cabin where he is staying, the reporter sees the block print of a wilderness photo.  When he awakes later, he sees through the window a campfire tended by a young man with two donkeys with back packs.  The boy gives every impression of being Everett Ruess, the poet/ artist/environmentalist who disappeared in 1934.  Ruess convinces the reporter that the land itself is more important than the human beings who rape it, and he returns to The Tribune to accept the position of reporting on the environment.

The last option is “Chinaman’s Chance,” set at the Centennial Celebration of the Intercontinental Railroad in 1969, marked by giant photographs of the officials given credit for the massive achievement.  A young woman who is the descendant of one of these officials is exposed for the first time to the truth of the day-to-day construction of the railroad track and the lives of those who built it.  She has the opportunity to compare the prejudice the Chinese workers shared with the feelings expressed by her fiancée, a PTSD-suffering Vietnam veteran, and comes away with a new understanding of both historical incidents. 

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