This blog post is a shoutout to and an introduction to the work of Elsha Hawk and Eddie-Joe Young, who very recently thoughtfully and tastefully posted their interview of me on their Hawk and Young website.
About Elsha:
Elsha Hawk’s 2010 short story submission was chosen for “Eclectic Flash: The Best of 2010”. She won the Write to Win contest in the Fall 2009 edition of “Writers’ Journal”. She teaches Functional Special Education at a middle school in Indiana.
About Eddie-Joe:
Eddie-Joe Young attended college on a Faulkner writing scholarship and was editor of his school paper. He was a freelance writer for the “Cajun Press” in Avoyelles Parish. He works on a tugboat pushing barges in the Gulf of Mexico and up along the Mississippi delta.
Elsha and Eddie-Joe are collaborators who live 550 miles apart and have never met! They communicate through calls and texts and emails. They use Google Docs to write and collaborate and edit and have docs installed on their smart phones to collaborate on the run.
They are building a compendium of short stories across time and space all based in one ‘Ellysian Empire’ from a galaxy far away that keeps interfering with ours.
In addition, They have a couple epic fantasy tales involving a dragon and her rider, a boy and his teddy bear, magic, pirates, and ninjas.
JVJ: If you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?
Eddie-Joe: Do even crazier stuff, don’t be scared to jump off that cliff or ask Jo Anna Fullilove to dance in the fourth grade. The worst decision in the world is the one you don’t make.
Elsha: Push yourself past your fear. Try new things.
JVJ: When was that moment when you realized that language had power?
Elsha: I was in the 4th grade when I wrote my first stories. We were allowed to type them up in the ‘computer lab’ at school on very old computers and I remember typing and crying because my main character, who was a dog, died in my story. My teacher asked me what was wrong, and I said, “Nothing, it was just a sad story”.
Eddie-Joe: I wrote a story in the fourth grade and had to read it out loud. People laughed so loud the teacher had to restore order to the class. (It was a comedy, this anecdote would mean something completely different if it was a tragedy.) I knew then that the power of comedy was on loan from the Gods. Laughter could light up the darkness.
JVJ: Who is your favorite author and why?
Elsha: The first author I ever admired was/is Lois Lowry. The Giver was the first book that took me to a new place so different from my world. I also love The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. From there, I branched into fantasy (Robin Hobb) and dystopian (Marie Lu). I’m a YA reader by far. Eddie-Joe has gotten me into Science Fiction.
Eddie-Joe: Kurt Vonnegut. Now, I have hundreds of books from Terry Pratchett’s Nation to Anne Mcaffrey’s Ship who Sang that I would die for, and let me not overlook the Count Of Monte Cristo that I reread every year because it is so amazing. However, I love Vonnegut because he never has a villain. It’s that internal conflict in his characters that makes us see we are the villains and the heroes in our stories.
JVJ: How do you select names for your characters?
Eddie-Joe: I love making up the names that is why Elsha lets me do it so much. I use a form of reverse engineering. I picture the character, her mannerisms, his appearance, their attitude then I just say the name. If you have ever met someone and said, “That guy doesn’t look like a Charlie, he looks like a Eugene,” well then you used my method of character naming.
JVJ: If you didn’t write, what would you do?
Elsha: I already have a main job. I hold 3 teaching licenses and teach Severe/Moderate Special Education.
Eddie-Joe: Listen, as a true artistic master of swordplay once said, “I just work for Viscini to pay the bills.” Well, I wasn’t as fortunate to become the dread pirate Roberts, but I do work on a boat.
