California author and accomplished blues guitarist Terry Sanville chats with Melissa Ford Lucken in this episode of Washington Square On-Air. Terry began writing creatively after retiring from urban planning, a career that includes many, many hours at the keyboard. Listen in as he shares writing inspirations and compares his two writing lives to playing tennis and badminton.

Terry Sanville’s piece, Deciding for the Dead, appears in the Summer 2022 issue of the Washington Square Review.

Terry’s Amazon page: Terry Sanville on Amazon

Website: Washington Square Review

This is Melissa Ford Lockin, Rosalie Petrouske, Susan Serafin-Jess, editors for the Washington Square Review. Washington Square On-Air showcases the poetry and fiction of the latest edition of LCC's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, read by the poets, authors, and editors themselves. Expect the unexpected as our contributors express experience and fantasy with humor, imagination, poetic license, irony, and passion. If you love language at its most original, please join us in our audio Town Square to celebrate a community of writers spanning from around the world to Lansing.

Hi, this is Melissa Ford Lucken. I'm one of the editors with the Washington Square Review, and today I'm happy to be with Terry Sanville. He's one of our authors.

His short piece Deciding for the Dead was in our August issue from last year. So. So, Terry, the first thing that I want to ask you is tell me a little bit about your piece. What was going on in your life when you wrote it?

How does it reflect you?

Excellent questions. Of course, this piece was interesting because it was the setting of the piece that drove the story.

I was out taking a walk one day, and I was walking onto the local university campus here in San Luis Obispo, which is Cal Poly. And I found this almost natural garden that was located directly adjacent to a railroad and railroad tracks and near this little stream.

You had to push through the reeds to get to it. But once there, it was this almost manicured lawn area with beautiful riparian habitat, lots of birds.

And I sat down and sort of enjoyed that environment. And I guess my mind was thinking about getting older, about dying and those kind of issues which you think more about when you get older.

And my imagination started to spin into high gear and Deciding for the Dead came about. That was actually driven by the setting, which is sort of unique for me. The story itself, the title says a lot. We decide for the dead all the time.

You know, relatives of people who have died are faced with decisions of what to do, how a person should be interred. But in this case, the two young men in my story find this old dead sailor next to this beautiful creek.

And one of them decides, with the other objecting, but going along with it, decides that they would let nature sort of decide.

And the nature in this case was this rainstorm that was forecast to deluge the area, and the body would be washed away and this young man's mind would be washed out to sea, and the old sailor would join the love of his life, which was the sea. A very romantic issue.

And the tension in this story is the tension between making that Type of decision and the issue of should relatives and family and friends achieve some sort of closure by making the decision for how a person should be buried or cremated or whatever. So that's sort of the nut of the story.

There's sort of a little twist at the end about the relatives of the dead person actually putting up flyers offering a reward for information on where the old man had ended up. And the reward was substantial. So the boys lost out on that. But I think, you know, issues of mortality is something that is one thing I write about.

The variety of things I write about is pretty broad, and that's just one of them.

There was also a theme of friendship in the story. So there was tension between the two friends?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. I think one of the boys is pre med. The other, I'm not sure, which is. Probably was my case when I was in college initially.

And yes, the tension between them is this issue of what to do and what is appropriate. What is the moral thing to do in this case, and whose wishes should they satisfy?

Is the one boy being egocentric and egotistical and romantic about the disposition of the dead person? And is the other one the sort of counterpart, the realist, who says, well, the cops are going to come and, you know, then we'll get into it.

We don't want that. Or if we don't report them, we're breaking the law. Not reporting the dead body, we're breaking the law. So the.

The two characters sort of play off against each other to expose some of the dimensions of the issue at hand. And they're friends, you know, and I think the point of view, character, the issue will be with him for the rest of his life.

And that's okay with him, his friend? Probably not.

That's the fun thing about a short story is you can have that kind of impact on the reader to use their imagination at the end to think about what happened with the characters after the page ends.

Well, my stories often answer some questions but leave others for the reader to ponder. And I also try to leave plenty of space for the reader to exercise their own imagination in filling in some of the blanks.

Short stories, you know, you can't do as much characterization, you can't do as much history, you can't do as much setting development. But I think they're an excellent form of literature to allow the reader to sort of fill in those gaps and exercise their imagination.

So I write fairly sparsely. My writers group that I meet with every couple of weeks.

There's always tensions between us because we have some of the writers who want to really spell out everything and answer everything. And the other ones that say, no, don't put too much in there.

You know, you just need enough, just enough to allow people to think about it and take it away. And I think the shorter is better these days anyway. My theory is that attention spans for long form literature is becoming more and more rare.

And I think it's one of the reasons why flash fiction is becoming more and more pop is that you can read it, you can feel the impact and you can move on. It's not an investment and a lot of time and mental energy.

Edgar Allan Poe had a famous quote about books and stories that you should be able to read that all in one reading. So it's a well established idea.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm curious. You said that setting isn't usually what drives your stories. So what usually sparks your interest and generates a new idea?

Boy, there's probably a dozen different factors that give me ideas for stories. I think it's a well known element that one's own life is a treasure trove of ideas for short stories.

And I have mined the living hell out of my own life and the lives of my friends and my family and anybody else I know. So characters in themselves and elements in their life can be what I call story seeds.

Things that happen to us in life really don't have all the components of a short story, but there are wonderful story seeds that you can plant and grow the story around them. And so the lives of friends and family and my own life and experiences are rich source of ideas that I mine all the time.

But the environment is one source. I'm writing a story right now. We've had a lot of rain out here in California. Unusual.

We went from severe drought to reservoirs full and water aplenty. So I'm writing a story that is based really on an environmental factor.

And in those cases, the environment actually becomes a character and it can become a dominant character. Not a point of view character, but a very dominant character.

And I do a fair amount of reading and so, you know, other people's work, I have to be careful about that because I look for the seeds in literature and not the stories themselves. I'm very careful about and very closed in about coming up with my own ideas. So I try never to follow the story ideas that I've read in other sources.

But I can't help but being influenced and spark ideas from reading. So reading, you know, what else is new, you know, writers read. I Just have some topics of interest that I explore too, in my writing, like music.

I've had a dozen or two stories that I've written that where music is an important part. Because I'm also a musician. You know, there's a whole emotional background of that that plays into developing my ideas. One thing that I did.

I'll close with this. In answer to your question. One thing I did as a novice writer is a friend of mine and I, we did what I call, and others call challenge writing.

We basically gave ourselves an assignment. Write a story written where the point of view character is not our gender.

For guys, having point of view characters that are female is always a challenge as a novice. Write a story in the second person. Who the heck does that? Nobody. For good reason, by the way. Write stories in different persons and different tenses.

Write stories on particular topics that we know nothing about, and write stories in all the genres. You know, write a romance, write a western, write a science fiction story.

To have someone that you can do that with and challenge each other, that come up with stories and be very supportive for each other was really helpful in the first years when I was writing short fiction, and it was a lot of fun. You know, we actually wrote an erotica story, which one of the stipulations was, when you were done. We were done writing the erotica story.

We had to read it to our wives and to our critique groups and see their responses. My challenge writing partner was reticent to do that. He was embarrassed by the writing.

But I think broadening out and trying to experience the various forms of fiction and the various topics is really important as a developmental issue, you know.

And I write short stories that are general interest and literary, but I also write science fiction and magical realism and some other subgenres that interest to me. So that challenge writing helped that. So that's where ideas can come from. Partner up.

I'm curious about where you got your start writing, because you were kind enough to send me some information about your background. And so I know you have a background in architecture and public administration and city and regional planning.

So that's quite different than creative writing, you think? Well, I'm sure it is creative, though, right?

Well, yeah. I worked as a public agency city planner, and we could get creative, but not too creative.

I always equate writing technical pieces for government agencies and producing creative writing pieces. Technical writing is to badminton as creating writing is to tennis. They both involve a net, they involve rackets.

But the principles for doing either form of literature are different, substantially Different.

Some of the things that you strive for in technical writing, clarity, organization, accuracy, completeness, you play with in creative writing organization, you have flashbacks and flash forwards and dream sequences and all sorts of wonderful stuff that you never would include in a technical writing piece. So I wrote as a city planner for 30 years, and I would produce 5 to 10,000 words today.

And it took me probably two years to lose my government speak language because over time, in most professions, a legal profession, architecture profession, there's a vocabulary and a structure of your writing that you develop that has really no place in fiction.

Not to mention the fact that in technical writing, you really don't talk about characters, you never use dialogue, you downplay emotion, and you avoid conflict at all costs. And those are the very things that you focus on in creative writing. So it took a few years to transition before I started to submit my first stories.

And I look back on the first story that I had published, and I was so embarrassed because I didn't know s from shinola at the time, and I submitted it in the wrong format, didn't give all the contact information they needed. But the publication, which was a magazine called Grit out of Topeka, Kansas, they phoned me up.

Actually the one of three phone calls I've ever received from. They phoned me up and said, we want to publish it.

And I was surprised and embarrassed as I learned that there's all these sort of format and procedural ways of going about submitting that I had to learn. But yeah, architecture, city planning to creative writing was. There was a definite transition there that was challenging.

Why did you do it? Why did you start the creative writing?

Why did I start it?

Well, because everybody starts for different reasons.

Yeah, well, I think I was always a storyteller. I think there's some people that just like telling stories and I like to write.

But after 30 years of government work and technical writing, I could have went into consulting. And that's what a lot of retired architects and city planners, especially urban planners, do. But it's more the same.

And I wanted to hang a sharp left in my life. I wanted to do something different, but I still wanted to write. And I like telling stories, so I had to learn how to do that on the page.

So far, I've been relatively successful.

I was kind of teasing you, asking you, why did you do it? Because, as you know, writing can be a tough business and it's a lot of work.

But what I'm hearing you say is that you had a good work ethic, you were used to producing words yeah,.

Yeah, I would write for out of an eight hour workday, I would probably be writing for five hours of that. And the other stuff would be organizational office stuff and communications.

And today writing creatively, I probably write for four or five hours a day. I produce maybe two short stories a month and I just said my 300 short story published not too long ago.

So, you know, nice thing about short fiction by the way, for people out there who are interested in creative writing, is one, it's short, you're done with it. And number two, if you write well, it satisfies a writer's ego in a more constant stream than writing long fiction.

Writing a novel, and I've done that too, is sometimes a multi year commitment and the feedback you receive from that is different. There's many, many, many, many authors out there who sell 250 copies of their book and that's the end of it.

Whereas I thought about the idea of submitting to journals throughout the world, internationally and nationally, and having little pockets of readers all over the place, reading my work for 10 minutes and taking away something and that sort of marketing, if you want to call it model, was very attractive to me. So I like spreading my work out over the U.S. canada mostly, but Europe and anyplace else that produces English speaking journals and magazines.

When you made the transition to the creative writing, how did you study? Did you take courses, learn from friends, read books?

I immediately joined a writers group and it was made up of novice and seasoned writers. So there was a good mix and I simply started producing stories and studying short stories that others have produced.

So yeah, I didn't take any formal courses. Now I end up giving lectures on marketing and how to come up with short story ideas.

But I wasn't ready to go back to school, although I know a lot of people who do that, gain immensely from that experience. I'm like my guitar playing. I am a self taught fiction writer.

Is there anything that you wish you had known that you know now when you started?

Well, it was funny. The first story, the first story, the very first story I sold, they paid me $800 for it for a 3,000 word short story.

So I'm going, this is my first story. This is going to be great. I mean the money isn't the center of my interest, but I thought this could be sort of fun.

That was the first and last time I ever earned that much for a single piece because as we all know, we give our work away, we short story writers.

I end up getting paid for about 15% of my submissions and 85% is a contributor's copy of the journal or magazine maybe and the publicity that it brings. Now if I would have known that ahead of time, would I have changed my strategy? Probably not. But it would have been nice to know.

The nice thing about being published as a short story writer is it helps with submitting and dealing with publishers of novels.

So it's a resume building issue when I tell publishers of novels that I 381 different magazines and anthologies that publish my fiction that has an impact and so it's beneficial in that regards. But yeah, yeah, if you're a short story writer exclusively, don't, don't bet on making a lot of dollars doing it.

Well, before we say goodbye, are there any first reads that you would recommend to readers? So after they read your piece Deciding for the Dead in the Washington Square Review, what would you suggest they read next?

The title of the work is the Last time you were here and it's a collection of 28 different short stories that have a touch of magical realism to them. So it's Twilight Zone updated to the 21st century.

But my latest collection is called Driving without Lights and it's published by Austin McCully Publishing and it's available on Amazon and directly from the publisher.

And it includes 17 stories that are based around the lives of people who live on this little dead end street on the west side of Santa Barbara, California. So what's the novel? Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.

I think I'm always getting authors mixed up, where he took a fixed setting and a fixed group of people and told a number of stories by shifting the points of view and picking characters that overlapped between stories. I've done the same thing with Driving without Lights. I think it's a wonderful read and I encourage people to grab a copy.

Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for joining us and we appreciate you spending time with us.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to our talented poets and authors. Until next time, this has been Washington Square On-Air, where we showcase selections from Lansing Community College's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, a publication featuring writers from the Great Lakes State, across the nation and around the world. To find out more about The Washington Square Review, visit lcc.edu/wsr. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed sharing.