Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
Interview with SOLDIER'S GAP author continued
11/3/2009 9:04:13 AM
Question and answer session on inspiration for stories and novels.
Q. You have five brothers and no sisters. Have you ever written about that?
A. Not that I can remember. People, especially women, usually say they're so sorry for my mother, so I guess there's a humorous story there. I recently read that your personality depends more on sibling and peer relationships than it does on genetics. I could definitely see that in our family. We were always jockeying for position and attention.
Q. You were raised on a farm. Ever write about that?
A. All the time. There's a chapter in SOLDIER'S GAP where Dave Jenkins and his little genius buddy, Moe Plesiac, visit a farm. Lots of memories went into that. I also did a short story entitled "Too Many Cooks" about a boy who was raised on a farm. There's quite a bit of me in that story.
Q. You write mysteries for the most part, but there's always more to them. Can you talk about that?
A. Religion seems to be important. I'm an agnostic, but I was raised Roman Catholic, so there's a process where you lose it. Dave Jenkins has a psychic experience in SOLDIER'S GAP, but at the beginning of the novel he's pretty much a non-believer and he goes through a process where he starts going to church again. He also has a partner who is a Mescalero Apache who attended Johns Hopkins on a LaCrosse scholarship. He majored in criminal justice but he needed a minor so he picked Native American religion. He is now heavily into native American culture including a belief in The Land of Ever Summer.
Q. What's next?
A. I was sort of dumbfounded by the popularity of Tim LaHaye's Rapture novels. It seemed like such a regression, so I thought I'd do something with Greek mythology, which is what my novel STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS is about. The Greeks knew very well that they invented their gods, not the other way around. Their gods are very humanistic. You have this idea that man is born with original sin in Christianity that I think is incredibly destructive. People should read BEFORE THE DAWN about this journalist who traced our DNA from Africa across the Red Sea and on to Europe and Australia. There was no Garden of Eden and no snake who tempted Eve. It's interesting that Eve got the blame there; that's a Mazdian influence. The Jews spent something like seventy years in captivity in Babylon and the Essenes, who notoriously hated women and blamed them for the evil in the world, brought that idea back to Israel. Ironically they were worried that Judaism was being Hellenized.
Continued
Dave Schwinghammer's published novel, SOLDIER'S GAP is available at Amazon.com.
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