Interview with Laurel-rain snow
I had an opportunity to have a chat with Laurel-Rain Snow. The chat went as follows:
1. In perusing your website and other interviews you’ve conducted, I see that you began writing at a very early age. Also, that you were “controversial” back then. Would you like to share some of those experiences?
Years ago I did a lot of experimenting with tone. In turn, I touched on many subjects that weren’t close to me but close to other people. The result was what could be looked at as insensitive writing. It happened here and there with my poetry. I would never purposely insult anyone or where they came from. Though just because you don’t try to do something, it doesn’t mean you didn’t actually do it, come to find out. Lesson learned. The time that sticks out is when a friend’s father found a poetry chapbook that my friend and I had published, The Body Politic. In it I had a poem that talked about how people had become overly politically correct and too sensitive to words. So at risk of offending people and losing potential readers, here are some of the lines that offended my friend’s dad: “Someone needs to put the mother back in f…r.” and “Someone needs to put the God back in damn.” And so on and so on. As a Christian it was his duty to be upset. Shortly after that he gave me a bible. He’s an amazing man and father. This is the same person who took me in when I was homeless. The entire family is amazing.
2. You studied journalism in college…very brave, since your early educational experiences were less than encouraging. Did you feel that reporting was a way into the world of writing, and if so, what about those experiences led to your current projects?
I thought I wanted to be a journalist in high school but the class had nothing to do with writing. I don’t know what we did. It was horrible. They wouldn’t let me take creative writing. Basically anything I was interested in during high school I wasn’t allowed or encouraged to do. It struck me as odd even while it happened. All they did was try to push me towards not following my dream and at the time I accepted it. However, in college when I heard they had a reporting class and there was a newspaper, oh, I was on that. By then I was big into questioning government and my creative writing was happening effortlessly. I did get a job on a newspaper and this is when I first started doing real research for my creative writing. On some levels I began approaching my fiction like news and it made all the difference. Now I did research. Now I paid close attention to dialogue. It wasn’t until then that I knew what it meant to be read.
3. I like the snippet about how your short story led to your book “The Flesh Statue.” What can you share about how that came about?
A friend of mine held a weekly discussion group that I attended. We discussed art and politics and religion and whatever came up. It didn’t matter. There were never more than about six or seven of us. There was a teacher in there with a publisher and a newspaper person (me) and a high school student etc. But what if we met to solve problems in society, I thought. What if we were an underground movement, I thought. What if this group were politically empowering. What if it had influence? What if we changed people’s lives? Then I made a plan for how we might do that and presto a short story. Years later the themes of this story matched many of the themes in The Flesh Statue so I slowly let the characters from the two stories meet. After that I let them do whatever they were going to do.
4. I like the part about using your downtime in your job at the movie theater to fuel your inspiration for “The Flesh Statue.” What other inspirations led to that particular book?
To this day I think this: The less trash the theater makes, the less work is to be had. You could gauge how well business was that day by how much trash was produced. That right there was the basis for a character. Bert stimulates his job in fixing cars by denting them himself in his off time. His thought process is that there is an industry based on just cleaning, fixing or rebuilding stuff in society. Bert at one point also had a short story based on him. I wrote it.
5. Your own life experiences with your grandfather were obviously instrumental in creating this book. Were there other personal moments that contributed, and if so, what were they?
There are too many real life moments I put in this story. Here goes one. In the first chapter when the police officer hits the guy who is arguing with his girlfriend—that really happened, except it was a man and his male lover who were quarreling, really. But yeah there was blood everywhere. About fifteen cop cars arrived at the scene, already wearing latex gloves and everyone thought, what are they trying to hide. It was horrible. Later you’d hear all sorts of stories about local police killing people unjustifiably.
To read more from this interview follow this link
http://embracethewhirlwind.wordpress....
1. In perusing your website and other interviews you’ve conducted, I see that you began writing at a very early age. Also, that you were “controversial” back then. Would you like to share some of those experiences?
Years ago I did a lot of experimenting with tone. In turn, I touched on many subjects that weren’t close to me but close to other people. The result was what could be looked at as insensitive writing. It happened here and there with my poetry. I would never purposely insult anyone or where they came from. Though just because you don’t try to do something, it doesn’t mean you didn’t actually do it, come to find out. Lesson learned. The time that sticks out is when a friend’s father found a poetry chapbook that my friend and I had published, The Body Politic. In it I had a poem that talked about how people had become overly politically correct and too sensitive to words. So at risk of offending people and losing potential readers, here are some of the lines that offended my friend’s dad: “Someone needs to put the mother back in f…r.” and “Someone needs to put the God back in damn.” And so on and so on. As a Christian it was his duty to be upset. Shortly after that he gave me a bible. He’s an amazing man and father. This is the same person who took me in when I was homeless. The entire family is amazing.
2. You studied journalism in college…very brave, since your early educational experiences were less than encouraging. Did you feel that reporting was a way into the world of writing, and if so, what about those experiences led to your current projects?
I thought I wanted to be a journalist in high school but the class had nothing to do with writing. I don’t know what we did. It was horrible. They wouldn’t let me take creative writing. Basically anything I was interested in during high school I wasn’t allowed or encouraged to do. It struck me as odd even while it happened. All they did was try to push me towards not following my dream and at the time I accepted it. However, in college when I heard they had a reporting class and there was a newspaper, oh, I was on that. By then I was big into questioning government and my creative writing was happening effortlessly. I did get a job on a newspaper and this is when I first started doing real research for my creative writing. On some levels I began approaching my fiction like news and it made all the difference. Now I did research. Now I paid close attention to dialogue. It wasn’t until then that I knew what it meant to be read.
3. I like the snippet about how your short story led to your book “The Flesh Statue.” What can you share about how that came about?
A friend of mine held a weekly discussion group that I attended. We discussed art and politics and religion and whatever came up. It didn’t matter. There were never more than about six or seven of us. There was a teacher in there with a publisher and a newspaper person (me) and a high school student etc. But what if we met to solve problems in society, I thought. What if we were an underground movement, I thought. What if this group were politically empowering. What if it had influence? What if we changed people’s lives? Then I made a plan for how we might do that and presto a short story. Years later the themes of this story matched many of the themes in The Flesh Statue so I slowly let the characters from the two stories meet. After that I let them do whatever they were going to do.
4. I like the part about using your downtime in your job at the movie theater to fuel your inspiration for “The Flesh Statue.” What other inspirations led to that particular book?
To this day I think this: The less trash the theater makes, the less work is to be had. You could gauge how well business was that day by how much trash was produced. That right there was the basis for a character. Bert stimulates his job in fixing cars by denting them himself in his off time. His thought process is that there is an industry based on just cleaning, fixing or rebuilding stuff in society. Bert at one point also had a short story based on him. I wrote it.
5. Your own life experiences with your grandfather were obviously instrumental in creating this book. Were there other personal moments that contributed, and if so, what were they?
There are too many real life moments I put in this story. Here goes one. In the first chapter when the police officer hits the guy who is arguing with his girlfriend—that really happened, except it was a man and his male lover who were quarreling, really. But yeah there was blood everywhere. About fifteen cop cars arrived at the scene, already wearing latex gloves and everyone thought, what are they trying to hide. It was horrible. Later you’d hear all sorts of stories about local police killing people unjustifiably.
To read more from this interview follow this link
http://embracethewhirlwind.wordpress....
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