RAWSISTAZ One On One Interview

Author Interview with Robert Tucker 
Interviewed by alice Holman 

RAWSISTAZ:  First off, tell us a little about yourself and how you became a writer. 

Robert Tucker: I was born being predominantly a right brain creative person.  Although this characteristic about my personality was not something I became aware of until I was a college student and learned about the structure of personality in a psychology class. At that particular time, I was a zoology major, a subject which I love for the same reasons that Byron does in the novel.  

I was deeply influenced by my mother to concurrently pursue the arts, (played classical piano, acted on the stage, also majored in Theater Arts) while majoring in Pre-med. I was also a fair athlete, played basketball and ran cross-country and rode and trained horses.   I did not ultimately become a doctor, but gravitated into the field of what I term social and business anthropology. 

I have always viewed life in dramatic terms, seeing and creating scenes in which I was a central figure from the time I was a young boy.  I live life as an adventure, infusing the commonplace and mundane with some imagined dramatic perspective.  When my son was a young boy, he commented, “Dad, you go over the hill.”   He meant I exaggerated everything.

Going over the hill has infused situations and events with enhanced interest and I have lived a wonderful childhood exceptionally rich and varied in a number of experiences that have influenced the writing of Byron and another coming of age novel, A Seed of Grain, (not yet published), and some ingredients of a major completed novel. This concept of integrating life and literature extends to three more novels, bringing my current total work to six novels. 

Religious influences have had an impact on my life, which accounts for much of the thematic focus commingled with science in Byron. 

Returning to original encouragement to write, that began with my fourth grade teacher, who praised and encouraged my continued written scenes and sketches in an elementary school newsletter.  At that time, the flame was lit, and I have carried the torch ever since with positive feedback and support along the way.  Literature became life and life became literature.  My second booster was my junior high school English teacher, who had me making presentations of book reports to the class and reading my on-going series of a canoe trip I had taken while an Eagle Scout in an Explorer troop. My Scouting and early adult experiences became the pivotal core of a 650 page novel.

Within the past few years, I have acquired an excellent literary agent who works with authors in the tradition of Maxwell Perkins with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.  I write not just to sell commercial genres, but to cross over and integrate commercial entertaining reading with literary quality.

RAWSISTAZ: Give our readers a short synopsis of your book, Byron. 

Robert Tucker: Romantically named after an English poet, Byron Mackenzie is a smart young girl who distresses her mother with her Tomboy ways.  When not in school, she explores swamps and collects frogs, snakes, and insects.  In her southern mill town, being less-than-feminine makes her different, but associating with the “wrong” friends gets her into trouble and nearly costs her life.  Byron is a dramatic novel about a young girl from a backwater town and the traumatic events that usher her into the dark realities of adulthood and the outside world.  Byron is filled with colorful characters and rich cultural textures that resonate with contemporary issues of gender, race, and religion.   

Byron is narrated by an older main character who has just graduated from Harvard University with a degree in molecular biology.  Byron Mackenzie recalls events from her childhood in a small town in Louisiana during the social and political turmoil of the sixties.  She remembers the people that would influence her future and her quest for truth and integrity: her wonderful grandfather, a Scottish migrant, who takes her to the shanty town saloon and introduces her to his secret black friends; her childhood friend, Josine Carrie, who is sexually abused by her own father and gives birth to a child; her best friend, Aristophanes Jones, a black boy raised by a single mother; her junior high school teacher, Timothy Maher, who teaches Byron about racial and religious tolerance and pays the ultimate price for his convictions; Touissant McIvor, a Cajun trapper and hunter; and Madam Josephine, a manbo or voodoo priestess, who both dwell deep in the wilderness swamp and help Byron overcome the death of her favorite teacher.  

Byron mirrors a society impaired by bigotry where a local redneck gang harasses and endangers a black boy and his white friend and where civic authorities abuse their power to further their own beliefs and interests.  But above all, this novel is about a young girl who suffers and fights for integrity and truth.  Through her will to survive, Byron emerges a hero against the man who would kill her in the face of devastating racism and violence.  Her story is a testimonial to the indomitable human spirit.  

RAWSISTAZ: How did you get the ideas for writing Byron? 

Robert Tucker: The American South is a wonderful and fascinating area of our country.  I see it as the cultural centerpoint of who and what we are as a nation, equal to the settling of New England, and with ultimately far greater influence as to who and what we are today.  The South is exotic.  It is geographically, socially, culturally and contextually hot..  

I have been doing business as a consultant in the South and in the Caribbean during the past 12 or so years. I have a deep and abiding respect for people who live there and their ways of life. The South appeals to my sense of the dramatic, as described in response to the first question of this interview. 

Writing Byron is a long work of love over a period of about twelve years, leaving and coming back to the project as the story and characters came into being in the context of my own life experience and study of the historical South in American history.  The book is an amalgam of my childhood influences, visiting and doing business in the South, what has transpired historically in our country, and relevance as to what is happening politically in America today.   

RAWSISTAZ: Have you ever lived in Louisiana?

Robert Tucker: Although I have never lived in Louisiana, I have visited the state often on business and for pleasure.  I have read extensively about the region’s history and culture in the writing of Byron. I also, of course, enjoy the music and cuisine.

RAWSISTAZ: How about the swamps? Did you travel through them in a pirogue?

Robert Tucker: My travel has been in a bass boat with a Cajun who had only one piercing blue eye, (the other was missing), and a gold front tooth, and an overwhelming spirit of joie de vivre.

I have had only one experience fishing from a pirogue.  Other Southern swamp and wetlands were visited along narrow back roads.   

RAWSISTAZ: How familiar are you with voodoo? If not at all, how did you come by that knowledge?

Robert Tucker: As described by Manbo Josephine in the novel, Voodoo is a religion just like any other and equally as valid and important in the lives of people who believe in and practice it. I came by my knowledge through reading about Voodoo, seeing scenes from motion pictures, seeing dances based on anthropological studies of its origins, and investing my frequently overactive imagination into Byron’s discovery of Voodoo through her friendship with Manbo Josephine. 

RAWSISTAZ: Do you plan a sequel to Byron?

Robert Tucker: Although I could write a sequel, I would have to carefully consider whether there would be any literary value in doing so. Several readers have expressed that Byron is so dynamic and life-like, they did not want to see the book end and have to part from her character. I was also told by one book club reader that she would love to meet and have a deep personal conversation with Manbo Josephine and wanted to know if she were based on a real person.  She is only real in my imagination and how I have depicted her in the novel.  It may be that is the best impression for a reader to have when she or he comes to the end of a book. When I hear feedback like that, then I know that, as an author, I have connected with the reader.

RAWSISTAZ: What other books have you written or are in the works?

Robert Tucker: To date, I have written six novels.  Byron is the first to be published.

A second comedic family oriented suspense novel was scheduled for publication this summer, but the publisher defaulted on the contract.  Through efforts of my agent, the book will eventually be placed with a new publisher.  A third novel is now under consideration with top publishers at Random House and St. Martins Press.  The placement of the other three novels are pending what transpires with the first three.  In addition, I have further book projects that will occupy me for the next twenty years.

RAWSISTAZ: Any closing words for our readers?   

Robert Tucker: Not all books are meant for all readers.  Consider the diversity of different kinds of books and the multitude of stories and topics.   I believe that reading a book you enjoy is a unique and individual experience and when you really like a book, you will recommend it to another reader, who will also have a unique and individual experience.  Reading a book is not a group social activity.  It’s not a concert.  It’s not a movie.  It’s the psychological and emotional connection between your life and the meaningful impact of the words the author offers to you on those pages.  Writing a novel and eventually having it published is a humbling experience.  Writing is not glamorous.  It’s hard work to do it well.  I encourage readers to appreciate the efforts of writers.  You may be an audience of one, but cumulatively, you are an audience of many and what you have to say about your reading experience is important and significant.

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