Joe R. Lansdale

How did you become a writer?

When I was four, comic books made me want to write them and draw them. I was a better writer than an artist. But they introduced me to storytelling. I wasn't, of course, at that age thinking of it as a career. I didn't know what a career was, but I knew I wanted to tell stories. This was compounded by TV shows, then stories and books. When I read Edgar Rice Burroughs at about the age of eleven, I knew I had to be a writer, and I had begun to understand what a career was. By the time I was eighteen I knew where I was going, but I thought it would be after a degree, perhaps a job as a professor. It didn't shake out that way. I went into writing much more quickly, and I'm glad I did. I loved it then, and love it now.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Too many to be thorough. But early on Edgar Rice Burroughs, comic writers like Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, though I didn't know Bill Finger was the writer for a lot of Bob Kane Batman stories at the time, but I loved his work. Kipling, Robert Louis Stephenson, Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Robert E. Howard, Keith Laumer, primarily because he led me to Raymond Chandler. James Cain, Dashiell Hammet, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont,
William Goldman, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth...I mean, really, this list is long, so I'll stop there.

When and where do you write? 

I write in the  mornings shortly after I wake up. Toast and coffee, and then I write. I write about three hours a morning, three to five pages a day most days, and some days I get a lot more. I'm steady. I spend the rest of the time reading, watching movies, etc., and I still teach Martial Arts once a week. Most of the time I work seven days a week. Sometimes I'll write a little extra, but less lately. I have to, I can write traveling, and have a lot. Hotel rooms, planes, airports, you name it. The key for me is showing up.

What are you working on now? 

A screenplay.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Put your ass in a chair and write. My own advice is that, and write like everyone you know is dead. Write for yourself, and then hope others like it.

Joe R. Lansdale is the internationally-bestselling author of over fifty novels, including the popular, long-running Hap and Leonard series. Many of his cult classics have been adapted for television and film, most famously the films Bubba Ho-Tep and Cold in July, and the Hap and Leonard series on Sundance TV and Netflix. Lansdale has written numerous screenplays and teleplays, including the iconic Batman the Animated Series. He has won an Edgar Award for The Bottoms, ten Stoker Awards, and has been designated a World Horror Grandmaster. Lansdale, like many of his characters, lives in East Texas.

Sam Quinones

How did you become a writer?

Well my father, a comparative literature professor, and my mother, an elementary school teacher, had a lot to do with it.  When I was four, we moved from Cambridge, Mass. to Claremont, California and my father told me the story of Odysseus along the way, over and over, as I was hooked. We didn't have a lot of possessions around the house, but we did have a lot of books. To this day, to me, a house doesn't look like a home without books -- same as a city without trees.

I went to UC Berkeley, lived in an infamous co-op called Barrington Hall and produced punk rock and reggae shows at the hall -- very DIY. That DIY approach to life has been a guiding compass, I guess. I also studied economics and American history.

Later in life, I was looking for a job that would support me, where I wouldn't have to wear a tie, that would leave me endlessly fulfilled and constantly exploring. A lot happened, but key to it was that I was lucky enough to get a job covering crime at The Record in Stockton, CA. I had great editors, a magnificent town, and a lot to write about. I wrote 4-5 stories a day for four years and emerged with enormous confidence in my writing.

Then I went to Mexico for 1994-2004 and that allowed me the freedom to write long-form narrative, something that the country is particularly given to. Unbelievable stories just there for the picking. So I was a freelancer in Mexico for that decade and that led to my first two books: True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx in 2001, and later, in 2007, Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. By that point, I had long been unable to imagine doing anything other that journalistic storytelling.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Early on:

Calvin Trillin, Edna Buchanan, Joan Didion, Alma Guilleramoprieto, David Halberstam

Respectively, Killings, Corpse Had a Familiar Face, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Heart That Bleeds, and most everything Halberstam wrote.

I've also had great editors: Bruce Spence, Rich Hanner, Sam Enriquez, Julie Marquis, Frances Fernandez and others.

When and where do you write? 

I write in the morning. Usually in my garage office, or at a cafe somewhere. Independent cafes, the writer's savior -- allow you to get out of the house, be among other people, but also get a lot done, particularly if it has no wi-fi, or if you have software to block the Internet. I usually have headphones and listen to music that has no lyrics.

What are you working on now? 

--I'm preparing a book of photographs of murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the walls of Los Angeles - The Virgin of the American Dream is the title. It's almost finished and should be out by March, 2022.

--I'm hoping to publish the manuscript of a triple-life California prison inmate, who wrote his life story while awaiting trial for his third murder. I've edited the work and helped him write it. Quite a story.

--I'm very interested in beginning to write more about neuroscience and neuroscientists -- their stories are mind-blowing, so to speak.

--A fictionalized version of the story of how the first Chinese-Mexican beauty queen was chosen (in Mexico), by accumulating more Pepsi bottle caps than any other candidate. True story.

--Finally, I'm working on getting published a manuscript for a children's book about the true story of a village in Mexico where everyone makes popsicles ("paletas" in Spanish).

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Writer's block is my craft's way of telling me I have not interviewed enough people. Usually I'm stuck on what to say, what story to tell and that's almost always because I need to talk to more and more varied folks. Or I need to re-interview the people I've already spoken to. No such thing as too many interviews, from the journalist's perspective.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Write about what you don't know but what you're going to learn all about. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

See Question 6. Leave your politics at the door completely. Journalism is not to understand that the world is just as you thought it was when you were 25. If you're lucky, you'll change your mind constantly, and you'll encounter triggers, unsafe spaces and a lot more every single day.

Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist, a reporter for 35 years, and author of four acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, the border. He is formerly a reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years. Before that, he made a living as a freelance writer residing in Mexico for a decade. His latest book, released in November, 2021, is The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.

In The Least of Us (published October 2021), Quinones chronicles the emergence of a drug-trafficking world producing massive supplies of dope cheaper and deadlier than ever, marketing to the population of addicts created by the nation's opioid epidemic, as the backdrop to tales of Americans’ quiet attempts to recover community through simple acts of helping the vulnerable.

The Least of Us follows his landmark Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which ignited awareness of the epidemic that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives and become deadliest drug scourge in the nation’s history.

Dreamland won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. It was also selected as one of the Best Books of 2015 by Amazon.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by Nobel economics laureate Prof. Angus Deaton of Princeton University. In 2019, Dreamland was selected as one the Best 10 True-Crime Books of all time based on lists, surveys, and ratings of more than 90 million Goodread.com readers. Also in 2019, Slate.com selected Dreamland as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. In 2021, GQ Magazine selected Dreamland as one of the “50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.” For Dreamland, Quinones has testified before the US Senate’s Health Committee, numerous professional conferences of judges, doctors, librarians, hospital administrators and at more than two-dozen town hall meetings in small towns across the country. A Young Adult version of Dreamland – for 7th through 12th graders -- was released in July of 2019.

His first two books grew from his 10 years living and working as a freelance writer in Mexico (1994-2004). True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx was released in 2001. It is a cult classic of a book from Mexico’s vital margins – stories of drag queens and Oaxacan Indian basketball players, popsicle makers and telenovela stars, migrants, farm workers, a narcosaint, a slain drug balladeer, a slum boss, and a doomed tough guy.

In 2007, he came out with Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In it, Quinones narrates the saga of the Henry Ford of Velvet Painting, and of how an opera scene emerged in Tijuana, and how a Zacatecan taco empire formed in Chicago. He tells the tale of the Tomato King, of a high-school soccer season in Kansas, and of Mexican corruption in a small L.A. County town. Threading through the book are three tales of Delfino Juarez, a modern Mexican Huck Finn. Quinones ends the collection in a chapter called "Leaving Mexico" with his harrowing tangle with the Narco-Mennonites of Chihuahua. Dagoberto Gilb, reviewing Antonio’s Gun in the San Francisco Chronicle, called him “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.”

Contact him at www.samquinones.com or samquinones7@yahoo.com.

Denise Turney

How did you become a writer? 

Love this question! It all started with a love of reading books. Did I ever read loads of books when I was a kid. In fact, I read about 30 to 55 books a week as a kid. Plus, I was active and outside a lot. I just loved to read. When I was 10 years old, my sister came running up the living room steps carrying a book of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks. Back then, there were next to no books written by or about African Americans in secondary schools, etc., so the book definitely caught my attention! No sooner did my sister put that book on the bed that we shared did she turn and, rocking a full, energetic smile, say, "Bye! I'm going back outside!" To this day, I don't think my sister (she's a school teacher today) EVER read that book. I was in a funk, but I soon picked the book up and started reading. Those characters and those scenes that Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about came alive! Did they ever. I'm telling you, I did not want that book to end. After I reached the end, I sat on the edge of the bed and this odd, eerie, peaceful feeling came over me. It came from deep down inside me. I paused in curiosity as to what caused the feeling. Then, my mouth swung open and I exclaimed to the empty room, "Ah! I'm a writer!" I call that my "burning bush" experience. The awareness/revelation came from deep down inside of me. I've been writing ever since. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

My favorite childhood book character remains the one and only, Pippi Longstocking! Love her spunk, her courage and her imagination! Also, loved Mildred Taylor's "Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry". Then, there was an aunt who read to me and my siblings with so much energy, it was like she was performing live on stage. Did she ever bring a story to life while she read out loud! They were definitely early reading/writing influences.


When and where do you write? 

Generally, I write novels while sitting at my small, round dining room table. One of my laptops is on this table, making it convenient to write at the table. When I first started out, I actually wrote in cursive in a spiral notebook. From there, I advanced to a manual then to an electric typewriter (Remember those days?!) Regarding "when" I write . . . I write at least once a day. On weekends, I write in the afternoon or evening. On Saturdays, I write at any time. 

What are you working on now?

Thank you for asking. My new novel, "Escaping Toward Freedom,” will be out January/February 2022. This story deals with a topic making headline news —human trafficking. It's a straight up, high paced mystery. Think it'll keep readers turning the pages without a second thought. Then, the second book in my middle-school "Rosetta" book series should be out around summer 2022. Rosetta is a spunk 10-year-old. Her mother is an artist and her dad is marketing executive at a major firm in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rosetta is mischievous and courageous. She comes up with the most off-the-wall, creative ideas! And, things just don't go as she plans. In this second book, she's decided to put on a city-wide skateboarding competition.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No. I don't think I've ever suffered from writer's block. I've felt tired and didn't want to write at times. A tip for those who might be dealing with writer's block is to try sitting down and just writing (or typing) anything, and I do mean anything. Just get words down. Another thing is to remind that the juice in the story is coming through the first draft. You can always edit and try to make it "perfect" later.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Write that first draft for yourself. Edit and market the story from the reader's point of view. Oh, and — write every day. The more you write and read, the sharper your pencil will get.

What’s your advice to new writers?

If you want to write, do just that — write. Book sales don't always reflect a story's depth or quality. If a story moves you (and I'm talking "really" moves you), it has one reader it impacted deeply and, to me, that's worth it. If you want to earn an income from selling books, write stories to market. In other words, write stories that have a sizable audience, people who will quickly and eagerly buy the story. Believe in yourself and let yourself absolutely love creating awesome stories!

Denise Turney (www.chistell.com) is a professional speaker and writer who brings more than forty years of book, newspaper, magazine, radio and business speaking and writing to a project.  She has been listed in various entertainment and business directories, including industry leaders such as Who’s Who, 100 Most Admired African American Women and Crosswalk.  Denise Turney’s works have appeared in Parade, Essence, Ebony, Madame Noire, We The People, The Trenton Times, The Pittsburgh Quarterly and Obsidian II. This talented speaker/writer is the author of the books: Portia, Spiral, Love Has Many Faces, Rosetta, The Talent Show Queen, Rosetta's Great Hope, Long Walk Up, Awaken Blessings of Inner Love, Pathways To Tremendous Success, Gada's Glory, Love Pour Over Me, and Escaping To Freedom.