Author: Greg Dawson
Publisher: Pegasus Books
ISBN: 978-1-60598-045-4

Click Here To Purchase Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy's Story of Survival, 1941-1946

Today, Norm Goldman Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest Greg Dawson author of Hiding in the Spotlight

Greg has been a journalist for 42 years, working at six newspapers in five states, in a variety of roles including sportswriter, city hall reporter, editorial writer, TV critic, metro columnist and now consumer columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. He grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, where his parents were on the music faculty at Indiana University. He stumbled into newspaper work while in high school and never took a journalism course. He attended Indiana University and Oberlin College but did not have the discipline to complete a degree. He and his wife, Candy, a retired reading specialist, live in Orlando and have two children, Chris, 34, and Aimee, 28.

Good day Greg and thanks for participating in our interview

Norm:

How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going?

Greg:

Growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, I had no ambition to be a writer - no ambition of any kind, really, except to play centerfield for the Yankees. I never took a journalism or creative writing course. I stumbled into newspaper work my junior year in high school by sending a letter to the sports editor of the local paper, a long treatise on Big Ten basketball. He was impressed by the neat typing and offered me a part-time job covering high school sports. I wasn't doing anything at the time, including schoolwork, so it was an easy yes. He did, however, have trouble finding me since I had signed a friend's name to the letter in a spasm of sophomoric mischief. The thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that I'm not qualified to do anything else. 

Norm:

Are you musically talented and what was it like growing up with parents who were well-known musicians?

Greg:

I am a brilliant listener and appreciator, but the poster boy for the rule that musical talent skips a generation. It positively leaped mine. I had no sense that my parents were well-known musicians because on the Indiana University music faculty they were surrounded by musicians better known than they were - Joe Gingold, Joshua Bell's teacher; cellist Janos Starker; jazz artist Dave Baker; violist William Primrose; pianist Jorge Bolet, to name a few - and at parties in our home I got used to meeting the likes of Perlman, Shostakovich and Oistrahk.   

Norm:

What motivated you to write Hiding in the Spotlight and what do you want your readers to take away after reading the book?

Greg:

I knew it was priceless material - great copy as we say - but I was afraid of it. As a writer, I'm a sprinter not a marathoner. I've been in journalism 42 years, most of it as a columnist writing 15 to 20 inch columns, avoiding long-form narrative whenever possible. So it was fear of failure, plus some normal laziness, that kept me from entering this gold mine and going to work. Ultimately, I was "motivated" by the relentless prodding of my wife, Candy, and my mentor, the greater writer and journalist Bob Hammel, who insisted that I must not allow this story to die. I want readers to take away two main things: a better understanding of the Holocaust in Ukraine, the most under-reported of Holocaust theaters, and an appreciation of the redemptive power of music and beauty.

Norm:

Your book reads more like a novel than a biography per se. Was that your intention? Why did you make that choice?

Greg:


That's a great compliment since I regard myself as having zero fiction-writing talent. I was even a failure at making up bedtime stories for my kids. What you may regard as novelistic in the book is my best attempt to create - or perhaps I should say re-create - a sense of place and time, of historical context and texture, for the events related to me by my mother over many hours of interviews and re-interviews. All the events in the book are true and there are no composite characters. However, using my mother's memories, I have imagined dialogue and scenes around the facts she has given me - a common device in historical nonfiction. There are scores of Holocaust memoirs with 10 times the amount of imagined detail.  

Norm:

Would you say that the publication of
Hiding in the Spotlight is the culmination of a life long dream?

Greg:

No - my only lifelong dream dissolved when the little league coach put me in right field.

Norm:

I believe
Hiding in the Spotlight is your first book. Did you enjoy the process? How was it different from your typical format?
Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?

Greg:

It was hard. The sprinter hit the wall several times. The first day I sat down write - after months of research and marking up interview transcripts - I stared at the screen like a zombie from the Village of the Damned. I think I finished one paragraph. Bob Hammel gave me the best advice: Think of it as a series of columns. That got me off dead center, and I began to enjoy the process - the writing challenge of creating connective tissue and background for my mother's vivid testimony. I learned that in writing, as in our national life, Roosevelt was right: all we have to fear is fear itself. And computers that eat entire files. 

Norm:

Has your environment and/or upbringing influenced your writing?

Greg:

Oh yes. I believe I inherited some small gift for expression, and my father gave me a love of words and literature, though for a long time all I read was the sports section. We were a liberal home, but he and I used to watch Firing Line just to revel in Buckley's gloriously rococo language. Another important influence was falling asleep to the sound of my mother practicing - Debussy, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin. I believe that musical and written composition are similar, and that a lifetime of my mother's lullabies endowed me with a sense of shape and structure - beginning, middle, end.       

Norm:

What has been your overall experience as a published author?

Greg:

It's been enjoyable and surreal. I still feel some detachment from the book on the shelf with my name on it. Must be an imposter.

Norm:

In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much?

Greg:

As a rookie author, I'm hardly the one to offer wisdom on such a question. Which is another way of saying - I have no clue. I will say this: There should be no absolute, unbending rule. Each book is a discrete and unique literary organism to be judged on its own merits. The older I get the less I believe in artistic rules of any kind. My mother told me Horowitz drove the critics crazy because he refused to play the music exactly as written. But he was Horowitz. As they say - don't try this at home, kids.

Norm:

Are you working on any books/projects that you would like to share with us? (We would love to hear all about them!)

Greg:

I'd like to do a book based on the weird, tragicomic, slice-of-life stuff that comes to me as a consumer columnist.  

Norm:

Where can our readers find out more about you and your books?

Greg:

Go to the fabulous website my wife created - MY WEBSITE - and read my column. Even better, subscribe to The Orlando Sentinel! It could save my job.

Norm:

Is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?

Greg:

Don't miss the poem at the front of the book, "School of Music," written by my boyhood friend, Theodore Deppe, now a published poet. He took piano lessons from my mother when he was a teenager and wrote the poem before I even thought of doing the book. He found the heart of the story long before I did.

Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Click Here To Read Norm's Review Of Hiding in the Spotlight

Click Here To Purchase Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy's Story of Survival, 1941-1946