Thanks for joining me today for my first author interview. Actually, the interview was completed by Maxine of Between the Lines, unfortunately she was not able to post it at this time and asked if I host Connie here. The week before last I posted my reveiw of author Connie Corcoran Wilson's lastest book Red is for Rage, and so I am happy to have her here once again.
I find authors fasinating people. They live in the same world as me, yet they seem to be experiencing it on a different level, or it's the fact that they are seriously 'people watchers'. I want to thank Connie for her very candid and most interesting answers . ps, occasionally I rather like to wear the colour khaki.
Interview with Between the Lines
1. Tad McGreevy can see the auras of
those around him. Each aura colour denotes a certain personality type,
suggesting that the path we are to take in life is already marked out.
Given that some of your characters are based on pupils you once taught, and
that some of those pupils are now unfortunately serving life in prison, do you
believe that these people were actually born with the propensity to commit an
evil crime?
First,
Maxine, let me say that this is an extremely refreshing question---very
thought-provoking and not run-of-the-mill at all. (Kudos!) Your question
about “the propensity to commit an evil crime” almost makes me go all religious
and start blathering on about Calvinism and predestination, where all events
are supposedly willed by God and (supposedly)
He selected eternal damnation for some folks and salvation for others. That
would bring up “the paradox of free will” and possibly soteriology and all
sorts of other intellectual religious theology points that I’m rather rusty on,
all these years later, to be honest.
So, let me just say this about these students—whom
I remember vividly---all of whom went on to commit evil crimes and capital
felony offenses. Sometimes, I feel the student was “not right” in the head to
begin with, yes. There’s a chapter in RED IS FOR RAGE when Jeffrey Dahmer
even says he felt that he was “born with a part of me missing.”[It’s in the
Chapter entitled “Sing the Die Song,” which explains more about Tetrachromatic
Super Vision.] Sometimes I think such
crimes have to do with socio-economic status and poor parenting. Sometimes I
think it is partially society’s fault, as various social agencies may have
failed a particular child in his or her formative years, at their most vulnerable
ages, when they badly needed intervention from a social service agency or a
significant mentor or a family member who cared.
But
back to my former students: One of the most heinous crimes
involved a student I had for 3 years who beat his girlfriend’s small child to
death intentionally,( after inflicting a great deal of abuse on the poor child
during life) and then blamed “neighborhood
children” for the victim’s death when on trial. (That didn’t fly).
Later, he said he
should get a new trial because the drugs he was taking to help him sleep while
imprisoned made it impossible for him to adequately aid in his own defense. (That didn’t fly, either).
What I remember about
this student---vividly---was that he was always given a “pass” by a
(supposedly) loving mother (who resembled nothing so much as the stereotype of
the squat middle-aged Russian woman, stodgy, wearing a babushka, lumbering
along.)
Mrs. “X” would trudge
into school and tell us that we couldn’t discipline this student in any way. He
was “untouchable.” (And I don’t mean the
Indian caste system term.) He was not
to be kept after school for detentions. We were not to discipline her little
darling, who would actively lobby to try to be sent to the office for any
infraction, as, during the stifling hot fall months, it was the only air
conditioned room in the school. When he
left your classroom for the Principal’s office, he would sport a huge Cheshire
cat grin, happy to be being sent to a more comfortable part of the building. He
once told a teaching colleague of mine at the high school level (after I had taught him three years through junior high school), “We liked to get
Wilson going.”
For Raymond, it was strictly “hands off”. (He
was 11 or 12 when I taught him in school.) This student was of average to
above-average intelligence, so we cannot blame low intelligence. But Raymond
had been having it his way for so long that he seemed to begin to feel that no
laws of behavior applied to him, somewhat like the Jeremy Gustaffsson character
in THE
COLOR OF EVIL series.
Raymond went on in
adulthood to prove this in the worst possible way(s). The last time I saw him
before he was arrested for murder, he was running through a supermarket with a
small, terrified child in a shopping cart, literally RUNNING through the aisles,
pushing the small child as fast as he could run, and putting every adult shopper in the aisles at risk. (Clean up on Aisle 3!) And trudging along behind this out-of-control individual
was Mom, never saying a word.
When that former student was grown up and on
trial for his life, his mother never once came to the courtroom during his
trial. His father was there every day, but his mother never once showed up.
Interesting, no?
So, was this person
born “bad?” Was he evil or amoral from birth?
Was he raised poorly? Was there
something “wrong” with him, psychologically? In Raymond’s case, perhaps both
nature and nurture apply, but not because he was mistreated by his parents, as
some criminals have been. Raymond always
seemed psychotic, based on his
behavior in my classroom (and I had him for 3 long years). Certainly he had
gotten the feeling that no standards of conduct or rules of behavior applied to
him and that may have contributed to his actions as an adult, when he crossed
the line and became truly evil.
In some cases, as with
the “Sixty Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday, March 17, about former
Philadelphia hit man John Veasey, the hit man did not answer interviewer Byron
Pitts as though he had much going for him in the area of higher intellectual
abilities. He had the blank look in his eyes of a killer. Veasey certainly had
no moral qualms about murdering people, even if he liked them. He spoke
dispassionately about killing people---which he had done a lot of---as though
he had merely swatted a mosquito. His arrest record even as a juvenile was
lengthy, with something like 60 counts for lesser offenses in his youth. Now, of course, he is married, claims to be
“born again Christian,” attends church weekly and drives a church bus. Some
doubters think it’s all an act. He testified against the Mob and was given a
new identity and a good job and he claims to be a changed man. He still had a
cold, dead, blank look behind his eyes and a woman he had threatened played
telephone tapes of him threatening to kill both her and her husband, whom he
blamed for the death of his brother. So, is he still a killer with no qualms
about killing, or is he a reformed born-again Christian? You tell me and we’ll
both know.
A
different killer I taught in junior high school murdered a man on a dare simply
because he was high on drugs. This was a poor district. We could blame
socio-economic factors. There is money in drugs, and drugs are an escape from
the realities of one’s life, if the reality is that you are born into poverty
and your future doesn’t look that bright. There were other issues, as he was a
student who came to this country unable to speak English, originally. So, was
he destined to go bad? Was it something within him? He lived next door to the
art teacher, who once saw him rolling around on the lawn on a Sunday morning,
fighting with his father, trying to hit his father over the head with a full
Coca Cola bottle, an image which has remained lodged in my brain ever since.
Then there was the student who---while a grade
school age student--- locked himself in the family bathroom, took a straight
razor, and slashed all the plastic surfaces in the bathroom (toilet lid, shower
curtains, etc.) He was about 8 years old at the time. Certainly old enough to
know that this was not ideal behavior to display for his terrified babysitter
trying to gain access to the locked bathroom that Kevin was destroying. When in
my class, he would sit in the front right corner desk and actively
self-mutilate during class with pins. You could ask him to quit, but good luck
with forcing him to do anything you requested. He died in his early twenties in
a drug bust gone wrong, burned to death in a downtown business, the fire set in
an attempt to cover the homicide. No one was ever arrested for his death. [His
sister was a piece of work, too, although she did not end up on Death Row.]
We might say
the individuals I mention above are examples of “Nurture, not nature,” but I
honestly feel that “nature,” in some cases, also had a hand.
Yet another of my students---not the sharpest knife
in the drawer, and one of 23 biological children born of the same mother---was
talked into killing a man who had only one leg and wore a peg-leg because a
truly evil Svengali type convinced him that the amputee with the wooden leg had
money hidden in his leg. They callously (and somewhat stupidly) threw the man’s
dead body in a ditch. (I’m telling you; you can’t make this stuff up. But you can write about it, if you experienced
these students, firsthand, and that’s what I’ve begun to do.)
I hope that answers your excellent question and let
me hasten to add, [having been psychoanalyzed by amateurs online recently
myself, unfairly, publicly ,
incorrectly, simply out of mean-spiritedness by people I had met for literally
10 minutes) : I’m not a psychiatrist and not a therapist, and I don’t say that
I am.
I am merely
an observer with a certain amount of knowledge of human nature who has done a
fair amount of reading, has a minor in psychology (and a sister who IS a
psychologist) and that the teacher years in the immediate family go back,
uninterruptedly, to 1927. I’ve written a book on successful teaching for the
nation’s largest teacher training firm, in fact (“Training the Teacher As A
Champion,” Performance Learning Systems, Inc., 1989).
So maybe my 33 years in the classroom, observing
student behavior, count for something. Or maybe I’m all wrong. You decide.
Meanwhile, I’ll be writing about all of these people. Just wait.
2.
Khaki
actually happens to be a colour I like to wear, why did you choose it as the
‘colour of evil’?
Another
excellent question! (I thought no one would ever
ask!)
First,
the word “khaki” comes from Persian and Urdu and has “dusty” or “dust” or “ash”
and I was thinking of the phrase used at funerals: “Ashes to ashes; dust to
dust.” So it’s a short hop, skip and a
jump from “khaki” to “death,” for me.
Second: I thought black was too obvious and had been overdone. [Wasn’t that
what you THOUGHT it would be? See what I mean?] I always used to tell my
writing students to throw out the first 2 clever ideas that came to them when
writing names for groups of animals as a creative exercise (“a stripe of
zebras”) because those first two would
be the easy ones and true creativity meant original thinking, thinking out of
the box, not saying what everyone else would say.
Third: for me, the color khaki
has always equated to decaying flesh or mold or algae or other unpleasant
connotations. Even the animals I can think of that we might describe as “khaki-colored”
are unpleasant, for the most part. (Fill in the blanks here with the names of
your favorite or least favorite khaki-colored animal.)
Fourth:
khaki is the color worn by most Armies, and even a synonym for certain types of
attire (“khakis”), and an Army often equates to war and death. That could
become a theme of a future book. In fact, the next book will probabtly be
titled KHAKI = KILLER, (although that is still to be decided.)
Fifth:
true funny story. I was writing a story once on the
practice of “having your colors done” when that was all the rage and people
would be pronounced a “winter” or a “spring” or whatever. I always thought
that, if you were a grown adult, you should know by the age of sixteen or so
whether you looked better in pink than in orange, but that’s just me. This was
a weekly humor column I called “The Write Stuff.” One of my friends revealed
that she had “had her colors done” at a cut-rate place (i.e. cheapie joint) and
her color turned out to be khaki.
I laughed and said,
“Well, you get what you pay for. Even Johnny Cash only wore black, but he
mainly visited prisons.” I thought it was funny and wrote a humor column for my
weekly column with these quotes. I was called in and told that the local woman
who was “doing colors” and bought advertising in the paper was not amused. (I
had also made fun of the concept of “having one’s horses’ colors done,” as a
rich, local dowager had ostensibly done). Apparently, not everyone shares my
sense of humor. So, that is another “khaki” story, which caused me to select it
from among others for THE COLOR OF EVIL.
3. What colour aura would you have and
why?
Well, as you know if you’ve read
both books, it would be good to be a brilliant green (NOT khaki) because you’d
be very healthy. Yellow is also a good color because those individuals are
sunny and funny and bursting with energy.(Yellow was my mother’s favorite
color.) So, I’d hope to be one of those. I wouldn’t be blue (remote, cool,
introverted) and, although I, personally,
like to wear pink, I wouldn’t be pink, based on my attribution of that
color to behavior (which you’ll have to look up for clarification.)
4. You quote from various songs in
both The Color of Evil and Red is for Rage, do you listen to
music when you are writing and if so what type of music gets you into the
writing frame of mind?
I do not listen to
music when I am writing. I have trouble writing and chewing gum at the same
time. Music would just take me somewhere I might not want to go (as far as
synching up the characters’ actions with the music that might be playing.) I am
musical, however (4 instruments; sang throughout college), and my daughter
actually graduated in Music Business from Belmont University in Nashville.
5. You also quote from movies, what is
your all time favourite movie?
It is impossible for me
to single out one All Time Favorite movie because I’ve seen so many and been
reviewing them in print since 1970. My book “It Came from the ‘70s: From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now” is
the product of 15 years as a film and
book critic for our local paper (Quad
City Times), and I took 8 years putting
it together. (*Reviews written AT THE TIME and saved for 43 years in scrap
books.) It has 50 reviews representative of the era, 76 photos (many not seen previously and obtained from the directors from onset photographs)
and interactive trivia and won 5 national awards.
I can tell you my favorite
films for THIS YEAR would include: “Flight,” “Bernie,” (Jack Black) “Argo,”
“Silver Linings Playbook” and---most recently---“Side Effects.” They are far
from my All Time Favorites. I used to respond The Manchurian Candidate (the first film) and there was an old British film called “The
L-Shaped Room” back in the sixties with Leslie Caron and Brock Peters, that
nobody but me has probably ever seen, that I loved at the time, just as I did
Robert Redford’s films “Love with the Proper Stranger” and “This Property Is
Condemned.” (This was when “Georgie Girl” was out, another great film.) But
I’ve seen too many films since then, and I hope to see many more. I’ve covered
the Chicago Film Festival for Yahoo for the past 5 or 6 years and my piece on
Brad Pitt’s film “Killing Them Softly” just got over 100,000 hits on Yahoo.
Check it out. It put me in the “Hot 500” for the month of February, which is
pretty interesting when you consider that I was on a cruise ship floating
around New Zealand and Australia and didn’t write anything that month. These
were all hits on pieces written prior to that. I’ve been blogging since about
2007 on Yahoo as a Featured Contributer
and Content Producer of the Year
(2008) in politics, on10 other blogs ,and for my own blog, WeeklyWilson.com,
where this Virtual Tour schedule is currently posted. I also love going to documentaries. One from Iran called “Be Like
Others” was horrifying, as it depicted governmental pressure on gays to
actually have sex assignment surgery if gay. Not very electively, I might add. And
there was a terrific documentary year before last called “On the Bridge” by
Olivier Morel of Notre Dame University about PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress
Syndrome) in returning Iraq war veterans that was heartbreaking. Some favorite
comedies would include Woody Allen’s “Love & Death,” “Sleeper,”
Bridesmaids,” “Lost in America” (Albert Brooks). I just plain love movies. If
you take a look at my WeeklyWilson blog, you’ll see comments from “There Will
Be Blood” at the top and you can scroll back to find evidence of my coverage of
several years’ worth of Chicago Film Festivals in October. And, when in
Australia this year, I greatly enjoyed watching the Australian version of the
Oscars, because, this year, my 3 favorite films of the Chicago Film Festival
were “Flight,” Helen Hunt’s “The Sessions” and “The Sapphires” from Australia,
which really cleaned up in Sydney with Chris O’Dowd winning Best Actor and the
entire film taking 11 out of 12 or some such. It was such a great film! Great
sound track! Wonderful story. And I like the Australian TV show “Rake” a lot,
too.
6. How did you go about choosing your
character names, Michael Clay is a good name I feel for the serial killer, but
McGreevy is very unusual.
[Thank you on the
“Michael Clay” comment. I have to be careful that I don’t end up calling him
“Michael Clayton” (the George Clooney film) which has actually happened a few
times.] McGreevy IS an unusual name.
I didn’t realize HOW unusual until I was chatting with Todd McGreevy, who
publishes the local entertainment newspaper “The River City Reader” and I
realized that his surname must have sneaked into my subconscious.
I told him about the
character “Tad” and HE told ME how rare this last name is. I’m glad Tad is a
“good” character so Todd can’t get mad at me for co-opting his surname without
conscious intent. I did that once before with another “good” character named
Lucinda Resnick (who appears in one of my short stories in the first “Hellfire
& Damnation” entitled “David & Rachel.”) I honestly had not thought of
her name consciously, at all, but it must have crept into my subconscious
because of its unusual nature. (In the story, she’s a nurse at a children’s
hospital, so a “good” character). The very first names I selected for characters
in my first (sci-fi) fiction novel (“Out of Time,” now Out of Print, from
Lachesis), were Bella (beautiful) and Renee (reborn). So, I’ve given some
thought now and again to the symbolism of a name (“Claire- light, etc.) but
McGreevy probably came from the gentleman mentioned---although I swear it was not intentional, and I had
no idea it was as “rare” as he claims it is.
7. I
am interested in what frightens people as horror is so subjective, I’m rarely disturbed by horror novels or
movies but I have an absolute horror of cockroaches . Stephen King has
written some very chilling stories in his time and I read somewhere that only Pet
Semetary ‘bothered’ him as he was writing it and that the scariest thing
for him would be if something happened to his children. So, have you been
haunted by Michael Clay as you have been writing about him, and in reality what
would really frighten you?
“Pet Semetary”
frightened ME, too! I was in a motel, alone, while in Iowa City
(my alma mater, the University of Iowa) taking a class entitled “Writing Across
the Curriculum” and I couldn’t sleep all night long. I agree with Stephen King
that bad things happening to good people is a fear, as is ill health and death
for loved ones. If you want me to talk
about things of a cockroach sort, I’m not cool with spiders and once vacuumed
up a HUGE spider hanging from the ceiling while 9 months pregnant with my
second child because I was too big a wuss to knock it down and pick it up. I
think we all have a fear of the unknown and of death and of things that might
hurt or kill us or those we love, so that is probably pretty universal…no? (I’m
not like Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie who once said they had a fear of
furniture with feet! Ha!)
The mystery quilt, which I won't name, is moving toward completion. Last week I showed you block one, this week block two. These make up the central portion of the quilt. I am working on border three, which is pieced and should be complete by the weekend. The big unveiling will be at my guild meeting early in June and I'll have photos of everyones' tops.
One of my online guilds, The Canadian Quilt Swappers (Yahoo groups) has started a quick mystery. It uses five fq's and will finish at 25 inches square. The yellow is my background colour. Step 1 involved selecting out fabrics.
.jpg)
.jpg)
