Author Interview: Erik Raschke

Erik Raschke is the author of The Book of Samuel (which is reviewed here), which is his debut novel.

For the readers who don't know you, can you tell a little about yourself and your book?
I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado in the Quaker faith. I’m not necessarily a practicing Quaker now, but I try and live my life by many of their principles. At eighteen I went to a small liberal arts school in Indiana called Earlham College, which is also a Quaker school. In my junior year I studied abroad in Northern Ireland. That was when I first learned about the many layers of conflict. I worked on a newspaper and covered stories ranging from kneecappings to executions to bombings. I witnessed first-hand the behavior of groups that were considered by many as revolutionaries and martyrs, committing horrific acts of violence and criminality. Since, I was an American, I had access to stories on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland, i.e. Catholics as well as Protestants would make me tea and chat about very personal issues that they wouldn’t necessarily talk about with the other Irish journalists. So I really got a good understanding of the human perspective of a war.
After Earlham I traveled around quit a bit, lived in Armenia for a couple of years, and ended up in New York City where I studied creative writing. I wound up staying there for many years afterward, simply because I never felt more at home than when I was in New York.
The Book of Samuel started out, when I was studying creative writing, as a short story about myself. As I wrote and rewrote, I gradually expanded it from being a novel about me to being a novel about violence and then to a novel about religion and violence.

What inspired you to write The Book of Samuel and what influences and experiences did you bring into the book?
Well, my own life experiences helped me develop the core story of a boy in Denver trying to hold his family together. Most of the characters are based on real people. But America’s response to 9/11 really pushed me to take the novel to a different level. I was in New York during 9/11. It was a terrible time and a pretty incredible time. You’ve never seen so many people, working together, saddened by the depth of the tragedy. On the other hand, when I went on a road trip shortly after, I saw how so many Americans were in such a vengeful frame of mind. Flags, and jingoistic bumper-stickers, and such. Why was the attitude in New York, where the attack had taken place, so very different than in the middle of America? I think because in New York there is always a lot of violence and people understand that violence breeds violence. That revenge breeds even more revenge.

A few years later I moved here, to the Netherlands. During that time America was wreaking havoc on Muslims around the world, while here, in the Netherlands, I learned how a much more subversive attack on immigrants from Islamic countries was taking place. If you were to ask me which tactic was worse, I would have to say that harsh immigration rules that tear families apart, like here in the Netherlands, are preferable to dropping cluster bombs, but neither is truly acceptable. On both sides of the Atlantic you were beginning to see an attack on an ethnic group (in my novel I used Mexicans simply because they are the most prominent minority in Colorado) as well as on the outcast individual (in my novel Saula Sobinski and David, but more topically, Mohammed Atta, Mohammed Bouyeri, etc.). I tried to incorporate those two distinctive categories of conflict into my narrative. Then I wanted to go on and answer the following questions: How does violence start? What is the initial conflict? Where does religion play into it? Where does it come from? How does it evolve? These are the issues I tried to address, because violence does seem to be born of similar patterns.

Martin Luther King once said something that Obama recently invoked in his Nobel speech: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." But as Obama went on, the Third Reich never would have been defeated by a non-violent movement. So what Samuel is grappling with in my novel is, how violence should be used, if at all, to protect oneself and what do you do when you see someone misusing the term “evil” to invoke violence. Do you use violence to stop someone who might be violent? Do you try and set an example? In the end, Samuel chooses to stop violence in a way that most Christians recognize. That was just the ending to my novel. There are many other ways to curb conflict and deter violence. Obama also says something so wonderful and perfect in his speech, something that Samuel discovers toward the end of the novel: “Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice.”

When did you know you wanted to write professionally?
When I was in high-school I started going to the readings of famous writers and listening to their interviews on the radio. I also wrote for the school newspaper, which sold over a few hundred or so copies per month. It was great to get all kinds of reactions to something I had created. In fact, during my senior year in high-school I did an unorthodox interview with the school principal. It was a lovely piece and put him in a very touching, human light. But he had been hired to “clean up” the school and wanted to maintain a tough guy persona. Since there was nothing really libelous or offensive in the piece, he offered instead to buy back all the copies of the newspaper so that they wouldn’t be sold. Of course, we didn’t do that (thanks to my amazing teacher/editor at the time), but it really taught me the value of words.

How long did it take to create the book and get it published?
I worked on The Book of Samuel for a little over four years. The last two years I worked on it almost everyday. The hardest thing about writing The Book of Samuel was writing from the first-person perspective of a 12-year old boy, using only words a 12-year old boy would know, and making the novel interesting to young adults as well as adults.

The book of Samuel is a YA novel. Did you write it as a YA novel?
I actually wrote it for adults. But as I have entered the whole YA realm and I’m getting feedback from kids, as well as adults, it’s wonderful to see something you’ve created cross all sorts of boundaries. Boys in Ohio to boys in Colorado have written that they loved the book. It’s a wonderful thing to hear.

What did you read when you were young, which authors inspired you the most? And which are your favorite books and authors now?
I love reading and have always read a lot. My favorite authors have changed over time. One of my favorite books that I used to read when I was eleven and twelve was The Great Brain series. I read those over and over. Then I moved on to Stephen King and such. Now, my tastes vary. I often gravitate toward the obscure and overlooked. I read a lot of titles published by certain smaller publishers because I know what to expect, which isn’t always a good approach. I just finished Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stars, Jane Alison’s, The Sister Antipodes, and Richard Price’s Lush Life. I’m aware that none of those titles are really obscure, but I’m not completely satisfied with any of them. I’m also working through a couple of histories. One about the life of King Louis the XIV and another about Amsterdam. I’m really enjoying both of those.
For the Book of Samuel I studied Roddy Doyle’s, Paddy Clarke HA HA HA, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and several other books. I read and reread the books to see what techniques the author used to make a young boy interesting to people who weren’t necessarily that age. Sometimes I figured out their method and sometimes I didn’t.

What's your favorite and least favorite part about being an author?
My favorite part of being an author is holing up and writing and reading. I love just getting inside my own head and the story and losing track of the days, something which is becoming more difficult to do with kids. But I also really love reading aloud and it doesn’t even have to be my own work. I was a teacher for many years and sometimes I’d read aloud entire novels. When you do that, it’s pretty fantastic. Almost like you’re tasting the words, convincing others why they should enjoy the story you’re forcing them to try.
I think I hate mailing out short stories. I hate making copies and stuffing envelopes and writing addresses. It’s almost as bad (but as necessary) as doing taxes.

Are you working on a new novel, and if so, can you tell about it?
I’m working on two novels. One is a detective novel about a group of boys accused of murdering their teacher. The other is about living here in the Netherlands and the nightmare I’ve had to deal with going through immigration. The former is about murder and the later is about contemplating murder. Maybe young adult books, but definitely not for children!

For more about Erik Raschke, visit his website here