Author Interview: Scott Semegran on The Codger and the Sparrow
Interviewed by Dania Kreisl
What was your inspiration for the story, and what gave you the ideas for Hank and Luis?
In the fall of 2020, the pandemic was upon us and my wife and I got into this unwanted routine of randomly waking up in the middle of the night, probably from stress. I was up late one night petting my cat when I had a vision of two guys in a car driving somewhere, one an old white guy and the other a young Black guy. But in this scene, they didn’t seem like a grandfather and grandson. By the way they were sitting in the car, they just looked like two dudes, like friends. The kid had his feet out the window and the old guy had his arm casually draped over the steering wheel. I kept thinking, “How are these two friends? They seem like friends. How would an old white guy and a young Black guy be friends?” As a humor fiction writer, I liked the odd-couple dynamic right away. I knew there could be humor in the dynamic between different generations and ethnic backgrounds. But once I started to work out their backstories—who they were and what they were like and what their family lives were like, etc.—then their similarities became clear to me. They both have mixed backgrounds—Hank is Jewish and German / Irish, Luis is Puerto Rican. Their past trauma connected these two; it’s what brought them together to be friends. They understood each other on an emotional level; they had similar needs even though their background and appearance was so different, and that was interesting to me.
The car is a very important aspect to the story, what is the backstory behind the car, and why did you choose this specific vehicle?
There is not much in The Codger and the Sparrow from my life personally, but the story of how Hank got the 1970 Plymouth Barracuda painted Panther Pink was my father-in-law’s story. My late father-in-law, Ed Hoadley, had this exact car when he was a young man. He told us this story several times over the dinner table, about how when he was finishing up his tour in Vietnam, he had an opportunity to buy a Barracuda through a military benefit. He ordered one and waited for it when he got back home, but there was a storm in Amarillo that damaged his specially-ordered car, and only a pink one was available with the exact engine he wanted. His stories of having a hot sports car and zooming around in it, confusing a lot of people in his small hometown because it was pink, would get us all laughing until we had tears in our eyes. I remember telling my wife at the time it was just too good a story to not use in a novel. When I started writing The Codger and the Sparrow, it was immediately clear to me that Hank—this tough, surly loner—would own a car like this, a muscle car painted pink. It just seemed like the right fit for Hank. So now, my father-in-law’s story is Hank’s story, how he came about to own a hot pink 1970 Plymouth Barracuda.
