Interview with Byron Edgington

Shortly after birth, I think. I’m second of ten, so I couldn’t get a word in edgewise around the dinner table, a place where concentration was required lest hunger follow. I’ve written as a long as I remember.

 

The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life--available at Amazon in paper and Smashwords as an E-book, is memoir based on my forty year career in commercial aviation. I lost my childhood dream to be a priest. A priest took advantage of me for his own perverse pleasure and I was forced out of the seminary. I got drafted out of college, went to Army flight school and flew Hueys in Vietnam for the 101st Airborne Division. After the war I found a commercial career flying helicopters all over the world. Aviation was a replacement dream come true , and a way for me to recapture a long-lost desire to help people when they most needed help. The book’s tag line is: “The heart of a man can want no more than this.” I had a marvelous life in the sky doing the work I dreamed of as a child, while soaring in a very different way than I anticipated.

 

Knowing someone has enjoyed the words I put together. An unanticipated pleasure of having The Sky Behind Me out there is hearing from readers that the writing is so strong. I kinda assumed the stories would resonate, but hearing how well written the book is has been tremendously gratifying.

 

I have three books in progress. One is an Air Medical novel about flight nurses and pilots based at a hospital who’ve found themselves cynical, disillusioned and feeling hopeless, both about the work they do and their industry. Working title ‘Final Sky’ has all the juicy stuff—intrigue, danger, adventure, sex (tasteful, worry not), inside info and a damned satisfying ending. Next comes Growing Up Crowded, my family memoir of being second of ten kids in a robustly Irish Catholic family in the fifties. Waiting for Willie Pete, my Vietnam helicopter novel is based on the Moby Dick model— a crazed company commander in Vietnam is obsessed with a North Vietnamese colonel who injured him as young lieutenant. ‘Captain Ahearn’ will take his vengeance on this NVA fellow, or kill himself and his company of aviators trying.

 

Melville, for sure, Harper Lee, William Faulkner, Christopher Hitchens, Tim O’Brien and myself.

 

The script for a play in High School titled BC Brain. It was standard banal HS fare, with a mad cave-man scientist who discovers all these amazing things, long before the supporting infrastructure exists. He invents TV, for example, long before electricity. That invention brought the most memorable line in the play, when he says, “Guess we’ll have to watch TV by candlelight.” That may tell you how the play was reviewed right there. Coincidence or not, I don’t know, but I’ve yet to write another script, and that was fifty years ago, so…

I have a terrible affliction for a writer; I sit and write a thousand, two thousand, sometimes three thousand words a day without difficulty. Mind you, I didn’t say three thousand ‘good’ words, but I can whip off a bunch of copy in a very short time if need be. My process, as it were, is to freewrite, then try to find a plot if it’s fiction, and then go where it takes me. My writing always, always benefits from a steeping process, that is, from sitting dormant for a time, sometimes a very long time, before I rewrite it. The truth is always in the rewrite.

 

First book I ever finished was a paperback version of Thor Hyerdahl’s Kon Tiki. I read that book in fifth grade, actually devoured it, read it over and over till the pages blurred. It’s such a grand tale that I may have to read it again. Kon Tiki showed me people who understand danger, and how we have a choice to either let fear govern our lives, or ignore it and have a real adventure. I’m happy to say I’ve had a wonderful adventure, because I understood that principle. And I think I picked it up from Hyerdahl and his band of sailors on that leaky little raft in the middle of the Pacific ocean. I’m not afraid of anything. Hey, I’m a writer, fear is not a factor.

 

First on the list has to be Moby Dick. Melville’s epic contains the DNA of America, our sometimes senseless pursuit of our own white whale, and the depredations we’re willing to commit to get it. It has racism, class division, our work ethic, our travel obsession and our pseudo-aristocracy and… You get the idea. The others, in no particular order would be To Kill a Mockingbird, in my estimation the greatest novel of the twentieth century, Lolita, believe it or not, for Nabokov’s willingness to create art from the sludge of our worst taboo, The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s brilliant essay-istic paean to Vietnam grunts and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury for the way he uses Benjy as Shakespeare’s idiot, telling his tale signifying nothing.

 

Good old word of mouth. There’s nothing that works better. Those hucksters and pucksters offering help to sell your masterpiece? Save your money.

 

Plastered with post-it-notes, but otherwise pretty clean. I’ve started to stand up to write more than half the time. Keeps the pounds off, and I think the writing’s better, too. It worked for Hemingway.