September 27, 2024
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 38 Interview: Paul Lamb
Paul Lamb joins us to share his contemporary, generational novels: One-Match Fire and Parent Imperfect. It leads to discussions of generations of fathers and sons (including two gay dads), different types of coming of age, and a cabin in the woods as the safe place to be one’s self.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- One-Match Fire Amazon
- Parent Imperfect Amazon
Bio:
Paul Lamb has a cabin in Missouri, at the edge of the Ozark Mountains. The cabin waits most of two hours away from his home in suburban Kansas City. The irony is that he doesn’t write there. The setting seems ideal, doesn’t it? A one-room cabin with a shady porch overlooking a sparkling lake, at the end of a road no one needs to come down, deep in a trackless forest. The only sounds that intrude are the occasional lowing of cattle from the ranch to the east or maybe a distant chainsaw. Paul has a chair and a table and pencils and notebooks there. He has uninterrupted solitude. He has everything a writer needs, and yet Paul cannot write at his cabin.
All he feels is a desire to go outside, into the forest, down to the lake, along the paths. He wants to see what bird is calling, whose shadow is floating across the ground, or what he heard scampering through the leaf litter. Paul wants to feel the sun on his skin or listen to the rain on the roof, to stare into the orange flames of a campfire, to throw a line in the water or watch for a beaver emerging from the lodge across the lake.
In short, when he’s there he wants to do all these things that keep him from entering the fictional universe where his characters go about their lives. So instead, he writes at home. Paul’s been doing this for a long time, so he calls it a win. He’s retired now from being a wage slave in the vulgar business world where he had worked to pay bills but had never sought a career. His children are grown and flown, leading fulfilling lives. Which leaves Paul free to pursue writing his stories as much as he wants.
