Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome author of The Past We Step Into, Richard Scharine, from Atmosphere Press, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.
About The Author
Richard Scharine is from rural Wisconsin. A professor emeritus in the University of Utah theatre department, his honors include University Professor, University Diversity Award, and College of Fine Arts Excellence Award. Dr. Scharine has published two scholarly books, five book chapters, and many articles. A Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Gdansk in Poland, he has directed a hundred plays and acted in seven foreign countries, including the title role in Oedipus at Colonus in Athens, Greece. The smartest thing he did was to marry Marilyn Hunt Scharine.
You can connect with author Scharine here:
Author Website
Interview
Welcome to TRB! Please give our readers a brief introduction about yourself before we begin.
I attended a one-room grade school. Disadvantages: No plumbing or indoor bathrooms. Having to work to the nearest farm with a bucket for water. Advantages: Taking 8th grade eight times if you paid attention. (Seven in my case because I skipped a grade.) Going to the library meant only walking to the back of the room.
Please tell us something about your book other than what we have read in the blurb?
In eleven of the twelve stories a woman gives advice to a man—almost always the character based on the author. Sometimes she shares with him. Sometimes she blames him. The title, The Past We Step Into, was taken from Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem.
What is that one message that you’re trying to get across to the readers in this book?
We’re aware of most of what happens in our lives, but it may take a long time before we recognize its importance. (I call it “the unawareness factor.”)
Who is your favourite character in this book and why?
Lynne, the wife of the narrator, appears in ten of the twelve stories. Two are told entirely from her viewpoint: In “Hiroshima 1964” she has a miscarriage, and in “Yemaja” she is diagnosed with a fatal disease. (Believe me, that is not the most important thing in the story.)
What inspired you to write this book? An idea, some anecdote, a dream or something else?
I didn’t even know I was writing a book until I wrote the 12th story, “Danton on the Kaw.” At that point I realized I had written a cycle of stories about the same set of characters, set from the 1940s to the early 21st century, but with a gap from 1964 to 1977. The events of “Danton on the Kaw” happened in 1970.
How long did it take you to write this particular book?
I’m an academic and I’d written two books and a score of articles and reviews in that genre, but I didn’t begin to write “fiction” until my sister died in 2006. She was the last of my family from that generation (including my wife), and as my academic career slowed down I began investing the richness of their characters in situations where they didn’t always find themselves in real life.
What are your writing ambitions? Where do you see yourself 5 years from today?
Given my age, my ashes will probably be found at the base of the tree that Westminster College planted by the Arts Building in honor of my wife. If I survive (given my age), I have a lot of stories yet to tell, courses yet to teach, and on-stage roles yet to play.
Are you working on any other stories presently?
Right now I’m working on a story called “Harvest,” which centers on a nine-year-old Wisconsin boy taking part in his first grain harvest in 1947, but the characters who shape his life are a cousin (who never appears) with almost God-like abilities and a hired man with a dark past. “Harvest” will also be the title of the book, if Atmosphere Press is willing to include a number of other stories I’ve written.
Why have you chosen this genre? Or do you write in multiple genres?
Children always make up stories. Mine were initially based upon 15 or 30 minute radio programs (Superman, Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, etc.). My father, who had to go to work in the 6th grade, always had magazines and books around the house. My favorite was Collier’s, especially the single-page science fiction stories by Ray Bradbury—many of which I still remember today. As a literary historian, I fell into the habit of teaching history through stories (80 minutes of stand-up).
When did you decide to become a writer? Was it easy for you follow your passion or did you have to make some sacrifices along the way?
Beats me! Following army service, I discovered theatre in my second junior year of college. After a Berlin Wall-based call-up was over, I was accepted into graduate school solely because in those pre-feminist days my wife had been accepted and they felt they hadto take me. Sixteen years later, I had directed 45 plays and the University of Utah hired me strictly as a classroom teacher. I’ve acted in seven foreign countries—always with an academic group—and I believe the connection between acting/directing and writing fiction is imagination. I always see pictures and hear dialogue when I write.
What is your writing ritual? How do you do it?
I don’t sit down until I have something to say (or a deadline). Even then I put it off as long as possible. It’s mid-afternoon before I touch the laptop and I’m there until the early hours of the morning. I don’t work from handwritten notes unless the story has a particular routine and time period to cover, e.g. a summer of riots and rehearsals in “Danton on the Kaw,” or a farm to farm grain harvest in “Harvest.”
How do you prefer to write – computer/laptop, typewriter, dictation or longhand with a pen?
The great thing about a laptop computer is the ability to start over again, and to save something that isn’t right at this moment, but may be useful some other place in the manuscript. You young whipper-snappers have no idea what it was like to write before the days of saved documents and copy machines. Imagine a 1964 graduate thesis written on a typewriter using four carbons to make five copies.
What are your 5 favourite books? (You can share 5 favourite authors too.)
I’ll stick to Americans and also eliminate playwrights. As a child of the ’30s I was first introduced to Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck. I read every word Thomas Wolfe ever wrote. (Thank God he died before he was 38.) Look Homeward, Angel is the most nourishing book I ever read, in that when we were breaking bivouac during a War Games exercise, somebody threw my copy into the egg crate of a mess truck. I also read nearly every book John Updike wrote, Kurt Vonnegut going back to when he wrote for Collier’s, and twenty years of short stories in The New Yorker. Alice Munro is almost exactly seven years older than I am, and should she go first, I am planning a Mr. Spock Vulcan mind-meld to get inside her brain. That girl can really mess with time!
How do you deal with Writer’s Block?
I know what I did, but I wouldn’t recommend it. At the beginning of 2020 I had stopped writing. “Danton on the Kaw,” the last and longest story of The Past We Step Into (located in the exact middle of the book), was fifty years in the making, based on the Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights riots in Lawrence and at the University of Kansas, where I was working on a PhD in the summer of 1970. I saw no way of dealing with it. Then I was diagnosed with cancer, and then the chemotherapy didn’t work. The answer, eventually, was Imbruvica, but before that was available I experienced some colorful hallucinations, the best of which I wrote as a short story which I hope Atmosphere Press will consider for my next book. When I got out of the hospital almost exactly two years ago, I couldn’t walk but my mind was clear and, thanks to the pandemic, no one could go anywhere anyway. In the summer of 1970 I was obsessed with Georg Buchner’s 1835 revolutionary play, Danton’s Death. Danton was an actual hero of the French Revolution, until it occurred to him that the only way of continuing the revolution was to kill more and more people. At which point he “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.” Shortly thereafter he was on the guillotine. Shortly after I was home, the protagonist of “Danton on the Kaw” was trying to produce Danton’s Death in the midst of an actual revolution, interacting and in one case, casting, actual participants in the revolution. As I’ve said, that story turned The Past We Step Into into a book. My methodology is not practical, but I can walk now.
What advice would you give to aspiring non-fiction writers?
For heaven’s sake, write from your own experience. Already suffering from writer’s block in 2018, I took a college class with other hopeful writers. My young classmates, whose accumulated ages roughly approximated mine, lived in a world of sexual and economic threats, reasonable fears, uncertain futures, and about the same number of intriguing possibilities. And I never read so many cliches in my life. Look around you, I would have counseled. Of course, given my age, I didn’t have to “look around.” I looked back, and wrote “Saturday Night in front of the IGA, which became the first chapter in The Past We Step Into.
Thank you, author Scharine, for your insightful answers!
About the Book
The Past We Step Into
“Time is the school in which we learn
Time is the fire in which we burn.”
— Delmore Schwartz
A young couple finds themselves hip-deep in sex, social change, the Arts, Civil Rights, politics, warfare, and — ultimately — children, as they negotiate the paths of self-discovery spanning over fifty years and four continents.
In the twelve stories of Richard Scharine’s The Past We Step Into, we experience the America we remember, the America we want to forget, and the America we dream of achieving.
You can find The Past We Step Into here:
Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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