Welcome to
Writers4Higher
This issue, Writers4Higher features
Pat Spears
Hi, Pat. Welcome to the
Writers4Higher family!
Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.
I am a
sixth-generation Floridian, and I have lived all but four years of my adult
life in the Tallahassee area. I first
wrote and published professionally as a social science educator, and it was a series
of case studies that I wrote for a Florida history textbook I co-authored that I
credit with bringing me to creative writing.
There was something in that experience that lit a fire, and at the
tender age of fifty, I decided to become a fiction writer. I had no idea where one started. To my knowledge, I’d never as much as met a fiction
writer. Still I was determined. I audited writing seminars at FSU with the
wonderful author, and gifted teacher, Janet Burroway, attended workshops, conferences,
and read tons of short fiction, including the works of Raymond Carver, Zora
Neal Hurston, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and Annie Proulx. In the beginning, I wrote really bad stories,
but kept working. Gradually, I began to
discover my own voice and was fortunate to have some of my earliest stories
published. I continue to write and
publish short fiction.
The
inspiration for my debut novel, Dream
Chaser, began roughly ten years ago with the reading of a newspaper story about
a family who adopted a mustang mare that suffered a tragic ending. The story stayed with me for years before I began
to shape a different story around what I imagined of that experience for a
fictional family. Dream Chaser will
be released in August. My second novel, Wildflowers, is to be released in 2015, and
it too is set in north Florida, but in the late fifties and early sixties.
When I think
about my long dormancy before becoming a writer, I remember those twilight
summer gatherings with my cousins on Granny’s front porch, pleading with her for
just one more of her marvelous stories. I
hope I carry forward a part of her in my fiction and that reader will come to ask
that of me.
Where
do you see your writing taking you in the future?
I sometimes bemoan
the likelihood that I won’t get around to all the stories and novels I’ll want to
write. Yet I am enormously grateful for excellent
health and the necessities required for living comfortably, so that I may make
the best of the time I do have. While I
don’t have a “career-plan” for my writing, I would like for my work to find a
faithful readership and that they will always want to know what’s next.
How do you use your talents/time to help
others?
The burdens
of working-class lives and their implications for the loss of human dignity is
the emotional momentum that drives much of my writing. My characters are drawn from those so often
viewed as the others; marginal voices of men and women
whose lives exist outside the realm of social acceptability. I write to reveal a deeper truth about my
characters, to forge a perspective that takes the reader beyond their profane
words and dastardly deeds to expose their deeper human spirit. Simply put, it’s the old adage of not
knowing a person until we’ve walked a ways in their shoes.
Would you like to find Pat?
Check out the links to this talented author:
Website:
www.patspears.com
Dream Chaser is available in print and e-book
versions through all the regular online retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Nobel,
Powells, etc.)
Publisher’s website: www.twistedroadpublications.com
Rhett
DeVane
Fiction
with a Southern Twist
