Meet and Greet: Donn Taylor

Donn Taylor is a novelist and poet who holds a PhD in Renaissance literature and has spent more than 20 years teaching college literature. His fiction includes a light-hearted mystery, Rhapsody in Red, and a suspense novel, The Lazarus File. His poetry has appeared in "Christianity and Literature," "The Lamp-Post" (Journal of the California C. S. Lewis Society), and other journals, as well as general audience publications such as the "Presbyterian Record" (Canada). His poetry collection Dust and Diamond: Poems of Earth and Beyond was published in 2008. He has also published essays on writing, literary criticism, ethical issues, and U. S. foreign policy. In a prior incarnation, he served in two wars with the U. S. Army.

Interview with Donn Taylor

BRC: How would you describe your book?

Rhapsody in Red is a light-hearted mystery set on a college campus. The hero (if you can call him that) is a reclusive history professor with musical hallucinations. He describes it as living in one movie that’s been mismatched with the music score from another. The heroine is a headstrong professor of comparative religions, determined to succeed with no help from anyone. When they stumble onto the body of a murdered colleague, police try to pin the murder on them. Though they’re completely ill-matched and incompatible, they’re forced to work together to prove their innocence by finding the real murderer. That requires them to prevail against the police, the murderer, organized crime, and (worse yet) an unsympathetic college administration. It’s kind of tough on them. But for the reader, there’s good fun in awkward character conflicts and a background of sometimes-weird campus life.

BRC: What message do you hope it conveys?

First of all, I don’t think fiction should be written to prove a point. If that’s the objective, we should write nonfiction and build our case through presentation of evidence and reasoned argument. Fiction proves nothing: it can only illustrate. That said, there are some realistic themes in Rhapsody. The college does accurately portray denominational colleges’ customary conflicts---commercialism vs. academic standards, education vs. indoctrination, and secularism vs. religious orientation. Mainly, though, there’s a straightforward treatment of the problem of evil, with Christianity as the only adequate explanation of it. That recognition forms the turning point for one of the characters. I don’t think the book contains any further message—except possibly the inadvisability of always saying what you think. That’s what keeps the hero in trouble: he says openly what others on the faculty are thinking but don’t dare say.

BRC: What did you enjoy most about writing the book?

Two things: First, the mild satire of college life, especially the ridiculous thing called political correctness. Then the humor of the continuing conflicts between the hero and heroine, especially the chapter in which a suspect tries to bribe the hero with a kiss. He gets lipstick on his teeth, and that gets him in trouble with the heroine, who thinks he’s been playing around while she took dangerous risks in their investigation. They have an angry encounter with a lot of wordplay: “She burns incense.” “In what sense was she burning?” Etc.

BRC: What did you dislike most about writing the book?

I can’t say that I really disliked anything about it, but I hated the necessity of discarding several good comic scenes in order to keep the plot moving. They’re still in the computer, though, so I may be able to resurrect or modify them for another book.

BRC: What inspired you to become a writer?

I don’t know if you can call it inspiration, but the drive to write seems to be part of my genetic code. I was raised in a home that thought literature was important. When my brother and I were in grammar school, my father read us large chunks of the Mark Twain canon. I began writing music at age fourteen. Two years later I entered college as a music major, studied piano with an instructor on leave from Cincinnati Conservatory, and played some of my compositions in her recitals. But at age eighteen I got interested in poetry---the Romantic poets, of course---and began writing poetry and some very bad short stories. Since then, writing is just something I have to do, though there have been long periods when job and family requirements pushed it far into the background.

BRC: Tell us about your writing process.

For poetry, I block out an entire morning. I begin with a main idea as I would for writing a paragraph. Then I try to come up with interesting images and figures of speech to present it. Sometimes I only get a few good lines in an entire session. Most poems take several days to get into an acceptable first draft. Some remain in fragments for months until I find a way to put them together. No poem comes out of the study until I think it’s as good as I can get it. (What’s that TV commercial---sell no wine before its time? Fiction is different. I start with characters and a premise, then several turning points, and a climax. After that it’s a seat-of-the-pants process of seeing how the characters’ work their way through conflicts into the climax. I do a lot of revision as the novel develops.

BRC: What are you working on now?

I’ve completed a sequel to Rhapsody in Red and started a sequel to the sequel. I’m also planning a thriller, different in tone and character, about the international black market in weapons. In between times, I’m teaching poetry writing at various writers’ conferences, most recently Blue Ridge, with the Texas Christian Writers Conference in Houston coming up in August. In that teaching, I’m advocating a return to good-quality poetry that ordinary readers can understand---the situation that existed in the days of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson.

BRC: What books do you enjoy reading?

Classics, of course: Dante’s The Divine Comedy; Milton’s Paradise Lost; most of John Donne, George Herbert, and Tennyson; some of Browning, Robinson, and Frost. In commercial fiction: the classic Western writer Ernest Haycox; the early thrillers of Gavin Lyall, especially The Wrong Side of the Sky; and I’m beginning to work through the Jack Higgins canon. In CBA fiction, I enjoyed Cathy Elliott’s A Vase of Mistaken Identity¬---delightful wordplay throughout, and Ann Shorey’s excellent historical, The Edge of Light. In nonfiction: anything by the economist and Hoover Institute scholar Thomas Sowell. I’m currently reading Newt Gingrich’s To Save America, a superb analysis of the current scene.

BRC: Where can readers buy your book?

I’m not sure which bookstores have it on the shelves, but it can be ordered through any of them or from Amazon.com.

BRC: Where can readers find you online?

My Web site is http://www.donntaylor.com/. It contains previews of all my books and links to Amazon.