Hard Road to Freedom follows a Union officer through his imprisonment into the political and social aftermath of the Civil War. What inspired you to write this book?

Having taken a course on American history while at university, I became interested especially in the events leading to, during, and after the US Civil War. This interest was revived 50 years later when my dying mother asked me to write a bio. I refused, saying if I did so. I’d be arrested. We laughed but having done so I remembered my student interest in the Civil War and thus inspired, started to write, not knowing that I had so little time to present something worthwhile to my mother (who was also a fan of historical novels) before she passed on.

What were some of your inspirations as a writer?

First of all, I don’t consider myself to be a competent writer as such. I am more of a poet as my 4 books of poetry will attest to. With that said, other than my mother, my inspirations were fine writers such as Margaret Mitchell, John Jakes, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Hailey, Alex Haley, James Michener, and my father Anthony Carter who wrote 4 illustrated books on native legends of British Columbia.

How much research did you undertake for this book, and how much time did it take to put it all together?

For 4 months, writing from 5 am to 10 pm every day (thousands of hours doing research) I finished books 1-3 just in time for my dying mother to read them. Book 4 was written a month later. The next 17 years was spent editing and re-writing (I suffer from mild dyslexia, two-finger typing, and now old age ..I’m 79), and then a few years ago I added illustrations to each book.

Can you give us a glimpse inside book 4 of the Matari series? Where will it take readers?

Full of action-packed suspense, Book 4, The Bastard Ground, was written mainly because my readers at the end of Book 3 were left wondering if the villain Lucas Garrow having fallen into the rapids of the Tennessee River had somehow escaped due justice. Thus provoked I wrote Book 4 as a post-Civil War ‘western’ to conclude the series with a satisfactory ending. Book 4 deals with the reconstruction phase that occurred when the Confederates were defeated on the battlefield but not in their hearts or minds. As a result, the Jim Crow laws persecuted blacks south of the Mason-Dixon line and to some extent north of it. Blacks also suffered the violence of the KKK and others so inclined. Through lynching, intimidation, the Lost Causers, and other racist methods, the defeated attempted to regain their honor as exemplified in Lucas Garrow. To counter this persecution, utopian colonies sprang up, Harambee being just one of them. Book 4 will satisfy those readers willing to partake in a wild and unpredictable adventure that personifies the times in which they occurred.

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