The Indie Exchange author interviews with Barry Wightman. Thanks for stopping by and telling us a little about you and your book.
You are stranded on a desert island, which one of your characters would you want to be stranded with and why?
As a male sort of person, my first answer would be Sooz (Susan Frommer), the brilliant, lovely, intense, on-the-run-from-the-FBI computer programmer of Pepperland. How could you resist? But that’s too easy, too obvious. So, it’d have to be Harrison Creach, the wise and worldly (perhaps somewhat otherworldly) record producer and advisor to Pepperland’s narrator Pepper Porter. Creach always seems to be in the right place, always ready with very timely advice for our hero. He’s smart, profane, been there done that and he knows what the old folks used to talk about on firefly summer nights on the porch. You can learn a lot from him Creach. Creach knows.
Your character has died and gone to…
Heaven – what would St. Peter say? “Creach, I’m overlooking a few, shall we say, awkward items but we need a fabulous stand-up bass player around here. You good with that?”
If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be and why?
Heaven – what would St. Peter say? “Creach, I’m overlooking a few, shall we say, awkward items but we need a fabulous stand-up bass player around here. You good with that?”
Where do you get ideas for your stories?
All that stuff is built-in somehow. But my internal antenna needs to be tuned in and you never know when it’s going to pick up some obscure vibration, flying in from something I just read, some old tune, some ancient connection, some person or some very old place.
What was the hardest scene/chapter/section to write from one of your stories?
It’s, er, hard to write about sex.
What do you enjoy most about writing?
Coming up with a great sentence, a new episode, which is not unlike creating a lovely bit of music. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling. As Pepper Porter would say, that’s It.
In your writing where do you see yourself ten years from now?
On my third, maybe fourth novel.
Who would enjoy reading your stories and why?
Pepperland is a love story, an achingly romantic love story. And if a love story set in the 1970s can be considered historical fiction and you’re into that, you’ll enjoy it. But anybody who loves music, particularly all that classic rock and roll from the 60s/70s will love it. And with Pepperland’s let’s-change-the-world, music and computers-will-set-us-free mission of Pepper and Sooz, Pepperland readers could be just about anybody.
Pepperland book blurb:What happens when one revolution dies and a new one begins?
She asks him—do you want to play your little rock ‘n roll songs or change the world? He says—both.
Pepperland is a ‘70s rock and roll race through the heartland of America—a love letter to the power of new-fangled computers and the importance of a guitar pick. Pepperland is about missing information, missing people, missing guitars, paranoia, brothers, revolution, Agents of the Federal Government, IBM, Hugh Hefner, a Dark Stranger, love, death and the search for it amidst the wreckage of recession-wracked, entropically rundown mid-seventies America.
Author bio:
Barry Wightman spent thirty years in high tech traveling throughout Asia before reinventing himself as a writer, voiceover talent and marketing guy. He has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is fiction editor for the literary journal Hunger Mountain, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can still be found with a guitar in his hand figuring out the riffs on old Kinks records. He is married, has three grown children, one granddaughter, and lives in Wisconsin.
Connect with the author:
FACEBOOK Barry Wightman