Author Interview: Scott Semegran

Welcome to this week’s free edition of Publishing Confidential. Today’s q&a is with Scott Semegran, an award-winning writer whose book The Codger and the Sparrow was published earlier this year.

Your book, The Codger and the Sparrow, brings two people together in an improbable friendship.  Hank is 65, and Luis is 16. Their initial commonality is that they both got in trouble with the law, but their bond deepened. Tell me what inspired this story.

So, the initial nugget of the idea for this story came to me in the fall of 2020. My wife and I had fallen into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night, probably from the stress of the pandemic. I was sitting on my couch late one night petting my cat (Berri, rest in peace) when I had a vision of an old white man and a young Black guy in a classic car, driving somewhere. They looked like friends to me, not a paternal relationship or anything like that. They were just two dudes hanging out, looking easy and comfortable with each other. So, I started to ask myself, “How are these two friends?” The stark contrast of their outward appearances seemed somewhat comedic. It wasn’t until I dug deeper into their backstories that I discovered what they had in common: their grief from familial loss.