ReadWonder: An Inside Look #228 (Author INTERVIEW)

An Inside Look with Greg Howard

(Author of The Visitors)

*Season #ONE (June of 2016 to March of 2017)

*Season #TWO (Summer of 2017)

*Season #THREE (School Year 2017/2018)

*Season #FOUR (Summer/fall of 2018)

*Season #FIVE (School Year 2018/2019)

*Season #SIX (Summer 2019)

*Season #SEVEN (Fall 2019)

*Season #EIGHT (Winter/Spring 2020)

*Season #NINE (Fall 2020)

*Season #TEN (Winter/Spring 2021)

*Season #ELEVEN (Fall 2021)

*Season #TWELVE (Winter/Spring 2022)

*Season #THIRTEEN (Summer 2022)

*I'm excited to present season #FOURTEEN with brand new interviews/authors.

*It has been such an honor to connect with authors and "chat" about their novel, characters, and thoughts about the story.

*This is the SECOND interview in which I'm calling Season #FOURTEEN.

*Thank you to GREG for being the Two Hundred Twenty-Eighth author I've had the pleasure of interviewing. I truly appreciate it.

The Visitors

by Greg Howard

(February 1, 2022)

How did you come to know the ghost/narrator?
The reader doesn’t know the identity of the narrator through much of the book, other than the fact that he is the ghost of a twelve-year-old boy. This left me a lot of room to formulate the character, discovering who he was as I went. In a way, the narrator is a bit of me, or a version of my twelve-year-old self. But because he is unnamed and a ghost, he felt almost like a physical manifestation of my childhood imagination.

What do you think is his most admirable quality?
He has a deep-seated (and admirable) need to keep everyone safe—from his fellow “lost souls” on the plantation to all the “visitors from the living world” who have come and gone over the decades. I think perhaps this comes from the fact that he didn’t always feel safe when he was part of the living world. And since no one in his life knew all the things he was going through, there wasn’t anyone he could count on to protect him all the time.

Is there anything you wish he would have changed or done differently in his story?
I wish he had reached out to someone and shared what he was going through in his life, to ask for help. But he was too afraid, and he didn’t feel safe enough to do that, which is incredibly sad. If he’d been able to find an ally, his life would likely have turned out very differently.

What do you think the ghost/narrator can offer to other children that are experiencing similar situations to what he went through?
I think young readers can learn an important lesson from the ghost/narrator. When you feel hopeless, talk to someone you can trust. Ask for help. Reach out. You don’t have to go through it alone. There is always hope.

How did you research the ghost/narrator and the circumstances he found himself in?
For the ghost/narrator, I pulled from my memories of my own childhood as I often do when creating a main character. And since he is a ghost, that opened up a lot of possibilities. I could create his world and the “rules” of his world and his existence solely with my imagination.

The setting of the book was a different thing all together. The story takes place on a deserted rice plantation in the low country of South Carolina called Hollow Pines. This is the area where I grew up and Hollow Pines was inspired by an actual deserted plantation that was just a short bike ride from our house. It was supposedly haunted and there were a lot of stories about the place that we’d heard all our lives. As kids we would ride our bikes down there looking for an adventure, and maybe even for some ghosts. But there’s a lot of troubled history in a setting like that and I had to educate myself to the real horrors of that place. What were the lives of the people who lived and worked their 150-200 years ago like, both the family who owned the plantation and the enslaved people? There was a lot to learn to create those characters tied to the plantation authentically, and in the case of the characters of the ghosts of the enslaved people, to honor their stories with honesty and respect.

Do you and the ghost/narrator share any similarities?
Oh sure. Like the ghost/narrator I was a lonely kid hiding secrets and my true self from the world and everyone around me. Like him I was also betrayed by someone close to me which led me to dwell in some dark places in my mind. And like him, I finally found a chosen family that loves and accepts me for who I am.

What was the hardest scene to write about him?
Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but there is a moment of reckoning that the ghost/narrator has with himself leading him to make a terrible choice that he feels will solve everything, when it doesn’t solve anything. The guilt and regret of that decision haunt him. I could relate to him so well in that moment. I felt his hopeless because I recognized it in my twelve-year-old self.

Who do you think was his biggest supporter and why?
His sister played a huge role in his life when he was part of the living world. She had his back as much as she could. She was his safe place. Then when he finds himself “stuck” on the planation in his afterlife, the other lost souls there become his safe place. They all look out for each other as chosen families do so well.

Why do you think some young people refuse to let others be who they are and actually go out of their way to make life miserable for others who may be different from themselves?
Unfortunately, a lot of times that type of behavior is taught through the example of the adults in their lives. There is no rationale for being hateful to someone. And no one is “born bad.” It’s learned behavior. Also, some people have an irrational fear of what they don’t understand. And sometimes when we fear something, we attack it first before it can hurt us. I also think there are some people who are miserable themselves, so they want everyone around them to be miserable as well.

What do you think ghost/narrator is doing at the present time?

Book Pages

Monday, September 26, 2022

An Inside Look #228 (Author INTERVIEW)

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