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- A Conversation With Greg Dawson Author Of Hiding in the Spotlight
A Conversation With Greg Dawson Author Of Hiding in the Spotlight
- By Norm Goldman
- Published July 1, 2009
- AUTHOR INTERVIEWS- CHECK THEM OUT
Norm Goldman
Reviewer & Author Interviewer, Norm Goldman. Norm is the Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com.
He has been reviewing books for the past twenty years after retiring from the legal profession.
To read more about Norm Follow Here
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