Author Interview & Giveaway: Mark McKenna

By: Lin Ryals on 11:01:00 AM

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 I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Mark McKenna, author of The Word Gang. You can read my review on it here.

Would you like to tell us a little about yourself?

I’m an old hippy with short hair. I’ve spent my life doing things that interested me: music, tai chi, meditation, photography, hiking and caregiving. I only worked enough to pay the bills.



Did you have to use a dictionary while writing The Word Gang?

I used three dictionaries. I own the Compact Oxford that Mr. Spinoza gives to Kalisha. I also referred to a dictionary given me by my high school, “The American College Dictionary.” And I own the big, moldy Webster’s that Sahmbaht buys from the used bookstore. And yes, mine is moldy, too. And the pages in the front are stuck together like Sahmbaht’s. But it’s still a great book. One way I test dictionaries is I look up the word “knot” and see what it shows. The old moldy Webster’s has about 50 pictures of how to make different knots. Very cool.

Have you had anyone like Mr. Spinoza in your life?

As a caregiver I was blessed to meet and spend time with many elderly people, both men and women. Each one of them found their way into the character of Mr. Spinoza. Also, one of my favorite writers is Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel prizewinner in 1978. Singer wrote a story called “The Spinoza of Market Street.” It’s one of my favorites. So that’s where the character’s name comes from, along with the Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).

When did you first start writing?

They made me write in the first grade. I wrote poetry in my 20s and 30s and started writing The Word Gang somewhere in my 40s. I am a late bloomer.

Do you work with an outline or just write?

Often I have a general idea like, “There’s a kid who’s a piano prodigy on his way to play a concert and he sees a dying deer while driving with his family to the recital hall.” Or, “There’s a girl living upstate NY who comes home from college and something very odd happens.” (This latter story is called “Dead To Me” and it’s online here. Warning to young readers: It’s an adult story.)

With respect to The Word Gang, I actually dreamed the story, or at least woke up with it in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and finally had start writing it down. I tell that whole story on TWG website.

Are there any authors that have really influenced your writing?

Scores of them. I read voraciously as a youth and still read quite a lot. Mark Twain. Isaac Singer. Isaac Asimov. Leo Tolstoi, my father gave me his complete stories when I was a teen. Margaret Atwood. Barbara Kingsolver. James Joyce (the amazement factor). Hemmingway. Vonnegut. Sigrid Undset. The 40s and 50s sci-fi writers. Dostoyevsky. Tolkien. C. S. Lewis (minus the polemics). Barbara Tuchman. Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Philip Roth. John Updike, all the Rabbit novels. In poetry T. S. Eliot (what I can gather) Frost (the verbal equivalent of Andrew Wyeth); Wallace Stevens. Shakespeare. Recent writers, Matt Bondurant, Tom McNeil. I just read a quirky writer named G.K. Wuori that I really liked. Cormac McCarthy is amazing, the opening of No Country For Old Men is possibly the most stark and vivid writing I have ever read. John le Carré. Rumer Godden. Maureen Dowd. Seymour Hersh. There was a thriller writer a generation ago named Mary Stewart; she was formulaic, but quite good, wrote My Brother Michael. I could go on. It’s like a trip down memory lane, this list. Seán Ó Faoláin. Roddy Doyle. Hawthorne. I’m reading The House of the Seven Gables on my phone at the moment. Willa Cather. My Antonia. Oh, Herman Hesse. Under the Wheel, Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game. And how about Victor Hugo? And Jean Genet. I read Funeral Rites in high school. Nabokov! Stop me. Stop me, now! Edgar Allen Poe. Arthur Conan Doyle. Growing up, I read Erma Bombeck in my local paper. An influence, no doubt.

Which was your favorite part to write of The Word Gang and why?

I love the stupid drunken argument that BD’s father Ernie has with Sally, the counterman at Jack’s Drugstore.” They argue over the word “discipline”—does it have eight letters, or nine. (It has ten, to save you from counting). Then they start arguing over the meaning of the phrase “a four-letter word.” I don’t know why, that section just cracks me up. I also like the climatic scene at the P.T.A. meeting and the TV interviews preceding it. They were fun to write.

What project are you working on now?

I’m writing short stories. I’m also marketing The Word Gang, which turns out to be a full-time job. I’m also thinking about publishing . . . something. I have a book’s worth of stories, a completed science-fiction novel (completed?) and I began a sequel to TWG, which is on hold for now.

Whacky Question: Do you make your bed in the mornings?

I sleep in a sleeping bag on a futon. Each morning I lean the futon against a wall and drape it with a colorful prayer rug. Then I carefully toss the sleeping bag into a closet and shut the door. 


How to win your own copy of this book? Fill out the form below! I'll leave the giveaway open until January 30th because that's my birthday!! :)Giveaway is courtesy of the author.

A few of the favorite words given so far... :)

• Unencumbered: free of encumbrance which is to be loaded to excess
• Quotidian: occurring everyday; mundane
• Succulent: tender, juicy, tasty
• Splendiferous: splendid
• Whimsical: playfully quaint or fanciful
• Love: an intense feeling of deep affection
• Wanderlust: a strong desire to travel
• Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way 
• Yes, Win, Faith, Cool, Optimistic.... :) The list goes on. =o)