Gavin Edwards
Author Interview - Gavin Edwards
Author I draw inspiration from: Robert Caro, and not just because he writes brilliant political biographies (of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses) that help me make sense of our world. He's my role model because he puts on a suit every day, sits down at his desk, doesn't get distracted, and does the work. I don't wear a suit and I do get distracted—but he still inspires me to do the work.
Author Interview - Gavin Edwards
Favorite place to read a book: A hammock in my back yard. Every hour I spend in there with a book feels like a slice of stolen bliss.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with: Lila Mae Watson, from Colson Whitehead's novel The Intuitionist—as the city's leading elevator inspector, she'd figure out the problem.
Author Interview - Gavin Edwards
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author: When I was six, the first time I came home from the library with as many books as I could carry, each one a magic spell of its own.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook: All of them! Ebooks are perfect for plane flights, while audiobooks are reserved for long car rides: I recently had the pleasure of sharing Sissy Spacek's reading of To Kill a Mockingbird with my 13-year-old son driving home to Charlotte, NC, from Columbus, OH, and watching his skepticism transform into eagerness with each disc of Harper Lee's story. But I love the feeling of a fat book in my lap, even when it's unwieldy: I recently opted for Neal Stephenson's The Fall in hardcover, even though it was 880 pages and an ebook would have made more sense.
The last book I read: Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, a hugely engaging history of the 14th century, full of the Black Death and rival popes and marauding knights.
Author Interview - Gavin Edwards
Pen & paper or computer: I write first drafts with a Uniball pen on pads of paper; I revise on the computer. (Typing up the first draft makes me concentrate on every word, and reconsider many of them.)
Book character I think I’d be best friends with: Meg Murry from Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time: brave, brilliant, stubborn.
Author Interview - Gavin Edwards
If I wasn’t an author, I’d be a: Computer programmer. Or at least that was my plan when I was 17. Coding and writing are different in many ways, but they have similar thrills, including the satisfaction of building something that didn't exist before, using only your mind.
Favorite decade in fashion history: The 1920s! Cloche hats, straw boaters, general jazz age fabulousness. I once interviewed Exene Cerveka (singer in the punk band X), who told me that in the 1970s, she was still able to find old flapper dresses in thrift stores.
Place I’d most like to travel: Iceland. I suspect that it was made up by a secret team of geologists and fantasy authors, but I'll never know for sure until I visit.
My signature drink: If the bar stocks ginger beer, I'm ordering a Dark & Stormy.
Favorite artist: I'm still getting my head around Christian Marclay's magnificent 24-hour movie The Clock, a collage of clips from other movies where at all moments, the time you are looking at on-screen is the time in the real world.
Number one on my bucket list: An impractical tour of remote Pacific islands, from the Galapagos to Easter Island.
Anything else you'd like to add: My favorite puppet on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was X the Owl (voiced, like so many of them, by Fred Rogers himself), full of enthusiasm for books and Benjamin Franklin and flight, but a good friend to Henrietta Pussycat. I like to think that his strigine spirit guided me while I wrote Kindness and Wonder: Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever.
Find more from Gavin, here:
rulefortytwo.com on the Web
@mrgavinedwards on Twitter
@theexquisitebook on Instagram
Author Interview - Gavin Edwards
