Dave Newman responds

Novelist-trucker-teacher-father Dave Newman included some great lines in these responses to my interview questions. Excerpt, you ask?

On writing and the married life:

I didn’t ever plan on marrying. I figured it was an either/or situation. You either wrote, which required hours of reading and writing, or you got married, which required hours of marriage stuff, whatever that was. Then I found myself in Vegas, getting married to a woman I barely knew, and I was unbelievably happy about it. My wife is awesome, and she’s a great writer, and we support each others’ writing in every way possible. It really speeds up the process to know you have someone in the other room who wants to read your writing, not is willing to, but wants to. We both have three published books now. We had a combined total of zero books before we were married.


Be sure to check out the full interview at Karen the Small Press Librarian.

Off the tenure track in Pittsburgh, PA

But thanks to the matchmaking of Karen the Small Press Librarian, Dave Newman and I had an opportunity to interview each about our novels of academic life off the tenure track. Karen posted part one, Dave asked and I answered, earlier today. If you're a fan of novels of working life, and you also appreciate Pittsburgh, writing, teaching, drinking, or living, you'd probably enjoy Dave's Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children. My interview with Dave should be posted on Karen's blog relatively soon.

small press librarian

I had one of those teaching days that begins with exhaustion, coffee, and thirty thesis paragraphs that could all improve, and then slowly winds its way through everything else--guilt, mozzarella, angst, various pains (most acute in the joints, brain, and lower back), active verbs (for chronological resume), dijon mustard (for, well, what else?), nuclear disaster, oatmeal raisin, more coffee, god's silence (you tell me), and staying late at work.

But then, as if rescued by the world of hope and possibility, Joel Thomas reviewed Fight for Your Long Day at Karen Lillis's Karen the Small Press Librarian blog.

Thank you!

But I'm not sure if I should tell him the "x-ray specs" double entendre was not intended. As best I remember.

Alas.