The Interview - Victor Grant

Victor Grant
Victor Grant
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An Interview With Myself

Q: When did it all start?

A: I’d begun writing initially at the time I was very young. I had a good collection of writings by the time I was eleven or twelve and they concerned cartoon characters and devious little things – short scenarios, etc… I remember sitting and thinking over the globe in my room – thinking about distant lands and winds and seas… At that point in time I did not know why I’d been so interested. I hadn’t a conception of why I wrote so much when I was young.

Q: Who’s your favourite author?

A: F. Scott Fitzgerald. There would be no doubt in my mind ever.

Q: What made you write?

A: An accumulative interest in poetry and prose. Wanting to exhibit the outer layers of reality within the poignant bits of emotion; to cast out the inner shadows behind living things into paper and briefly transmit the music of a glance over an array of words. It is the most joyful thing in the world.

Q: What’s the difference between prose and poetry and what are the hidden tactics?

A: These I will keep to myself. Poetry goes speedily and loveably. Prose goes wobblily and steadfastly.

Briefly adhering a speck of minute anticipation
Lingering frailly in the fatigued, dingy dusk
Relatively appreciating the ostentation – A sedation
Where the husk of a blue-tinged, gloom-smothered leaf
Dances and shimmies and leaps …

Q: What’s writing mean?

A: Writing means putting people’s ghosts into words and ascribing character to mere silhouettes over the whitened pages.

Q: Do you believe in Ernest Hemingway?

A: Yes. He is great in that he gives out the love to prose through the grandness of perspective – you may see how he does it, sometimes coarsely and at other times – subtly. F. Scott Fitzgerald briefly envelops the sight and never lets go – he creates worlds. And Oscar Wilde’s worlds, unlike Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s seem upright and beauty-bound and a little shadowed – like something grand and witnessable only once, yet … Yet without the modern aspects of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Fitzgerald seems to retain of a permanency and a fleeting sort of expression that to me at least transgress any other type in the clarity they lend out to the imagination.

Q: If you could tell me a great book what would that be?

A: A book about love. All Fitzgerald’s novels - inducing the imagination through the rhythmic sway of words, and Hemingway’s - making wonders upon the paper in prose, and Ring Lardner’s and Oscar Wilde’s and those popular and classical names … There’s magic within the words of J. D. Salinger whose style indubitably lends an edge even to the current generation. And Ray Bradbury appears prominently with his futuristic and embossed style which leaves one breathless while prowling through innumerable arresting and encompassing sci-fi worlds. There’s too Lord Alfred Douglas who’s had a staunch grasp upon the imagination. The corners of literature, especially the older ones, hide high-priced secrets. But don't forget Fitzgerald, he's a must-read for all who'd like to dabble in the stratum of finer and higher literature.

Q: If you should put your mind about life and literature into a sentence what would that sentence be?

A: ‘I would live to love sparingly the scarcened drops of the lingering rainfall until it’s vanished and I may gradually reflect under the yellow stars.’

Q: What’s an author’s biggest worry? And how does one write?

A: That he cannot write or that he would stop being able to write any minute. Writing usually, to me at least, comes subconsciously, and then almost breathlessly the pages are filled up – sometimes mutely, sometimes speedily and at other times they’re filled up within the brevity of a few subconscious gestures.

Q: What would you like to tell the younger audience?

A: Dreams aren’t always in words, or pictures or great art … They come and go as shadows over the high corners of buildings in the night … They pass as glimmers and then may reappear again. They are different for every person. Sometimes they are meaningful and at other times their meaning’s only slight and we tend to try and recapture them continually throughout time. The truth is that the only worthwhile thing is a set of ideas and perseverance. Ideas create emotions – real life mimics the shadows they are set upon.

Goodbye, Victor Grant!

It was a pleasure. Oh, and one last thing –
Don’t forget to keep in mind everything beautiful lasts temporarily … Or at least within the time it’s meant to be.
© Victor Grant.
All Rights Reserved.
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