#ThisorThatThursday Author Interview with Mark Leichliter
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I’d like to welcome author, Mark Leichliter, to the blog for #ThisorThatThursday!
Things you need for your writing sessions: I’m a terrible creature of habit, in large part because I’m always looking for the quickest path to writing productivity. As a result, I have several clear needs. I write in the same two locations of my house. I write only on yellow legal pads. I have a favorite pen and others know not to touch it. Mostly I need quiet. I’m like most writers, I suspect, in that I write best from a strange point of nearly altered consciousness because writing is so immersive. I’m living in the world I’m writing about as I write, so I don’t stand up very well to distractions. I can edit and revise in nearly any environment, but for first draft, I want to get lost in the work.
Things that hamper your writing: If I start to think too directly about the reader or the marketplace early on, that kills a story before it ever has a chance to develop. There is a time and place to consider the reader’s needs—particularly in terms of what they need to know or what might be unfamiliar—but that comes later. The larger intrusion of worrying what someone might think is also a story-killer. This comes at the most obvious level of wanting people to like the work but it also can be much deeper, where I can fall into the larger trap we’re far too conditioned by in this country, the trap of comparison. We can only write the books we can write; we should want to make them the best books we capable of writing, but to string out false comparisons to other people’s work or worse, other people’s experiences or visions, can be crushing. I’m convinced that every book has its own needs and its own rhythms. It’s the writer’s job to find those. To look anywhere but within the text I am writing and the world that has given rise to it is only hampering to the process.
Things you love about writing: Ultimately as a writer you have no one to answer to but yourself. I care greatly about readers. I need to satisfy editors. But each day when I sit down at my writing desk, I really can write anything I desire.
Things you hate about writing: Ultimately as a writer you have no one to answer to but yourself. Sound familiar? If you want to write, you had better learn to live with your decisions.
Things you never want to run out of: Have I mentioned that I trend towards Type A? My wife loves to give me a hard time about some of my obsessions. Some are obvious, like having lots of toilet paper on hand. That just makes good sense, right? I’ve shared already that I write longhand on yellow legal tablets. There’s a lot of lawyers in the world, right, so why are these tablets so hard to find? Or at least that’s the reasoning behind having a few dozen on hand at any time. And rum. One certainly should have a reserve bottle for when the primary runs out. I was a boy scout. An Eagle scout in fact. I took the “Be prepared” motto of scouting fully to heart.
Things you wish you’d never bought: So I suspect we all have our embarrassments for this question, those items that you’re a bit afraid to hand over to the attendant when you make the drop-off at Goodwill or The Salvation Army. Wow, my list is probably long. There was a certain light blue, big-shouldered, “Miami Vice” style blazer that hung around the closet unworn for several decades. More than a few pieces of trendy exercise equipment likely advertised on late-night infomercials; remember the “Ab-buster?” A certain POS Mercury station wagon with a rear-facing back seat that inevitably made the child sitting in it nauseous, the car that dropped its transmission and suffered broken engine mounts. The manual push-lawn mower (“Come on, the yard’s small; I’ll get additional exercise …”) That last donut … I could go on.
Favorite music or song: I’m entirely eclectic in my musical taste, and I absolutely love music. If I could carry a tune in a bucket, I’d drop this writing gig and sing everywhere I went. Kind of like a musical. (And wouldn’t the world be a kinder place if we lived inside a musical?) My tastes are so eclectic that I can drive my wife crazy—jumping from Kenyon Benga one minute to a Disney tune the next. Heavy on my play list will always be bands like The Lumineers, Mumford and Sons, The Head and the Heart, Of Monsters and Men. But of course I reveal my age with still loving 70s and 80s rock. I’m a Crash Test Dummies superfan.
Music that drives you crazy: I better whisper this because I live in Montana and grew up in Wyoming, but let’s just say that, despite eclectic taste, I’ve been slow to embrace country music and when I do, I prefer to keep it old school.
The last thing you ordered online: a very specific round glass food container with a screw-on lid (have I mentioned the whole Type-A thing?)
The last thing you regret buying: a very specific round glass food container with a screw-on lid; okay, this is the problem with online shopping; until you hold the thing in your hand and test the lid, well, it’s just so disappointing.
Things you always put in your books: Private jokes. This is stupid, I know, because it’s usually for an audience of one, but I regularly leave in at least one thing only I find funny or a reference that only a tiny handful of people can recognize. I’d give an example, but then that would kind of defeat the point, right?
Things you never put in your books: Anything gratuitous. My books are not really violent per se anyway, but I feel that all actions, including violence and sex, if present, must be a natural and productive outgrowth of plot or character. I take this a step beyond many writers, for while I place heavy emphasis on realism, I think crime fiction owes it to real victims and real investigators to present the world in a way that is accurate to the actual world. The act of solving a crime is compelling itself, and doing so is an outgrowth of applying hard work and good investigative thinking to what can seem disturbing or irrational actions by people who are either troubled, depraved, or out of their right minds. Because we are dealing with complex psychology, we’ll venture into difficult terrain, but I think writers need to with a sense of purpose and authenticity.
Favorite places you’ve been: Our oldest daughter is currently living in Mainz, Germany working on post-doctoral research, which offered my wife and I a good excuse to—finally—get to Europe. We last travelled, as it turns out, the summer before the world went into science fiction mode and international travel was shut down. There are any number of places that might be worthy of highlighting as an answer to this question, but because I’m a writer who likes detail, I’ll narrow it down to one tiny, locals-favorite restaurant in Paris’s Latin Quarter. We’d come to know the Left Bank after staying there for about a week in a remarkable little apartment tucked down a gated, curving stone alley all of about 3 feet wide. So we had learned the immediate neighborhood fairly well. On our final night in Europe, we’d come back through Paris for our departure the next day. This was restaurant was classic Paris: down a cobblestone side street, an unimposing street front you’d miss if you weren’t looking for the tiny circular sign hanging above the door; diners in a multi-paned window; a dining room that held all of five tables; an elegant but simply dressed hostess/waitress/owner; and an absolutely unforgettable meal; the special was roasted bone marrow, and WOW!
Places you never want to go to again: When I was seventeen, I interned at the Wyoming State Board of Charities and Reform, which, among other responsibilities, is the state-level agency that oversees the Department of Corrections. At the time, Wyoming was building a new state prison, and the old prison—which looked like something off a movie set even in good weather—was still very much in operation, as crowded and decrepit as it was. One of the officials in our office invited me to go along for meetings he had at the prison, so we made the two-hour drive from Cheyenne to Rawlins. It was an unusually rainy late-spring day, and pulling through the car entrance tunnel of the old stone building felt like entering a castle. Seventeen, naïve, a good kid who was bookish and interested in the law, was I ever a misfit and ripe for the shocks of being inside a state penitentiary. In a truly surreal moment, among the catcalls from prisoners as we passed along a cell block, someone called me by name, and I turned to an inmate with his head up against the bars of his first-floor cell, a guy from my neighborhood who was in for grand larceny. He was two years older than me. His dad was a lawyer, which helped in shortening his sentence but hadn’t kept him from a conviction. I didn’t know him well, but seeing him on the other side of prison bars, while not a great surprise given his personality and his regular defiance of authority, still was shocking. Perhaps the only greater shock that day came from being allowed to enter the gas chamber, long unused but still the method of death for capital cases should it be called back into action in those days. The chamber looked like something out of a submarine, with windows for witnesses to watch the man strapped to the chair at its center die. I was never exactly the sort of kid destined for prison, but had I needed to be scared straight, that trip would have done it.
Favorite books (or genre): In mystery, I’ll read virtually anything written by Tana French, Laura Lippmann, and Laura McHugh. I’m a huge fan of early Dennis Lehane. As I broaden out from mystery, my tastes are nearly as eclectic as those in music, though I trend literary. In the books I want with me on a deserted island category, I have to have these: All the Light We Cannot See, The English Patient, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Beloved, They Things They Carried, and The Times Are Never So Bad.
Books you wouldn’t buy: I can’t stand the stuff that simply preys on readers, things like a lot of self-help and diet books. I’m sure some are valuable, but those that clearly just want to make a buck are offensive. There are strange books coming out now from the so-called “influencers”; let’s make our own decisions, people!
People you’d like to invite to dinner (living): (I always love versions of this question; I probably spend too much time thinking about it, although the “living” requirement adds another twist.) Anthony Doer, Claire Vaye Watkins, President Obama, Norah Jones, David Letterman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mike Krzyzewski, Carli Lloyd.
People you’d cancel dinner on: Mark Zuckerberg, President Trump, Mike Lindell (the My Pillow guy), Richard Spencer.
The coolest person you’ve ever met: Tim O’Brien
The celebrity who didn’t look like he/she did in pictures/video: I don’t have a lot of experience in this realm, but I once had dinner next to Richard Dreyfuss, and while he was recognizable, man was he old. I guess that makes me pretty old too!
About Mark:
The Other Side, a contemporary mystery novel, is the crime fiction debut from Mark Leichliter. Writing as Mark Hummel, he is the author of the contemporary literary novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow and the short story collection Lost & Found. His fiction, poetry, and essays have regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals including such publications as The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, Fugue, Talking River Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, and Zone 3. A former college professor and writing program director, he has also served as a teacher in an independent high school, directed a writers’ conference, worked as a librarian, and taught on the faculty of several writers’ conferences. He is the founding editor of the nonfiction magazine bioStories. A native of Wyoming, Mark lives in Montana’s Flathead Valley.
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