I would pay a lot of money to interview the great authors of our time. Steinbeck, Bronte, Hemingway, Austen, Twain, London, Service, John McDonald, Robert Parker. But at the top of my bucket list would be Henry Charles Bukowski {1920-1994}. So I asked myself would it be so very strange or inappropriate to pretend what it might have been like? Post an interview with ‘Hank’ Bukowski even though he’s been dead almost twenty years? The answer was no!
I imagined I was sitting with him, in a corner booth, in some neighborhood watering hole. Old die-hard drunks sit up at the bar minding their own business. I can see tree roots growing from the seat of their pants into the seat of the bar stools. Wet, green tendrils curl around the stool legs. They don’t speak. They stare into their empty glass or into their own smoky reflection in the mirror on the back wall. What do they see? A long-lost heaven? A nearby hell?
Bukowski has already finished his first drink and signals the bartender for another. I am paying of course. (viewer discretion advised ~ language)
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The Interview:
Q. Where do you write? Do you have a special room, shed, barn, special space for your writing?
CB. Anywhere they’ll leave me the hell alone. I’m not particular.
Q. Do you have any special rituals when you sit down to write?
CB. A fifth of bourbon, a couple packs of cigarettes. Quiet. Enough paper, which can be a problem when I’m between jobs.
Q. What is your mode of writing?
CB. A pencil or pen, I don’t care. Paper. My Remington typewriter if it’s not in pawn. Sometimes the bartender will let me have the left over stubs of pencils 
from around the bar. Many years ago, this drunk in a suit was sitting next to me, over there at the bar. He was complaining that his company had bought something called a ‘computer’ and they were making him learn how to do his sales reports on it. He hated it but he said, ‘I fear that it is the face of the future, Hank.’ Goddamn machines, taking over the world and us bit by bit. I’ll stick to my pencil and paper.
Q. Do you have a set time each day to write or do you write only when you are feeling creative?
CB. Listen, girl, I wish there were more times when I didn’t ‘feel creative’; didn’t need to write. Occasionally when I’m f—ing or I’m blind drunk, or both, I can take a break and forget.
Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?
CB. Legitimate writers don’t procrastinate.
Q. How does a writer begin? How do you write, create?
CB. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, when it comes to Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.
Q. Do you ‘get lost’ in your writing and for how long?
CB. I’m lost right now. Wait fifteen minutes…..(he stared into space) nope, still lost. Does that answer your question?
Q. Who or what is your ‘muse’ at the moment?
A. Ha! You’re funny. Let’s see, junkies, slant-eyed women, barkeeps, dogs, cats, mocking birds, my landlady, bums, women….oh yeah, women most definitely. War, rain, politicians, pigs, beautiful young girls as they walk by, Jane, the shoeshine man, booze, my father, gravediggers, whores in Mexico.
Q. When did you begin to write seriously?
CB. I don’t remember…a long, long time ago.
Q. How long after that were you published?
CB. Decades. I sent my stuff to every sex rag, publisher, and agent I could find. It was always rejected until one day It wasn’t. I’d sell my blood so I could buy stamps.
Q. What makes a writer great?
CB. You can’t have rules. No woman who is so important that she gets in your way. No job that can keep you from what you have to do. Knowing that sometimes when you’re drunk you are a better writer.
Q. ….and the all important: What does the process of going from “no book” to “finished book” look like?
CB. There’s never ‘no book’ for me. It might not be down on paper yet, but it’s always there. When my head gets so full it might explode then I find a pencil and write it down. I don’t give a shit if a book is ‘finished’. That’s what publishers are for. I just send them my stuff and if they print all of it or some of it, I’m happy. The thing that I won’t let them do is change anything. Not a word. It drives ’em crazy.
Q. What inspired your stories and your poetry?
CB. Mostly the streets of L.A. And don’t call my shit ‘poetry’. That’s what the suits call it so people will buy it. “…my poems are only bits of scratchings on the floor of a cage…” Mostly I just write what I see and how I feel about it. And I see a lot of sick shit. And I don’t feel so good about it.
Q. Is there anything else you’d like my readers to know?
CB. Yeah, a few things: ‘We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.’ and……
‘There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.’ and….
‘The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting’……. and finally,
‘I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.’
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MY 
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Q. How have your life experiences influenced your writing?
But even my Regencies reflect my life: my love for Austen and Regency romances; how I almost studied 18th century literature in grad school because I had a fabulous professor for an Austen seminar; how my favorite stories involve lovable families (think Laura Ingalls Wilder and Betsy-Tacy and All-of-a-Kind Family); how I love English literature in general, from Renaissance poetry to the end of the 19th century, etc.
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CD. No two readers will ever agree on this! When I put my own fiction-reader hat on, I’m looking for books with rounded characters and plausible situations, even if it’s set in a fantasy world. Bonus points if the story makes me laugh. Not too much navel-gazing, please, and a plot with a traditional conflict-rising action-climax-denouement. I must be too old to enjoy the stories where there’s no real conflict, or where it’s resolved with 25% left to go, and then it’s just 25% of people riding off into the sunset. Yawn.
A Chinese American from the San Francisco Bay Area, Christina fell in love with English literature and the classics after going through an obsessive Regency-romance phase in her early teens. While her reading tastes have grown to include sci-fi with robots, survival epics, and doorstop-sized histories, love stories will always be her favorite. She and her family live in Bellevue, Washington.
Christina Dudley is the author of fourteen indie-published Regency romances, as well as the traditionally-published contemporary romance Pride and Preston Lin, a modern adaption of Austen’s classic which was named to the 2024 Best Romance lists for Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and Library Journal.
Q. What first inspired you to write?
It’s called The Holiday Cottage (in the UK the title is The Christmas Cottage) and it explores themes of loneliness, friendship and family. It was so much fun to write and I hope it will make readers laugh aloud (although they may well shed a tear too!).
Q. What makes a writer great?
Sarah Morgan always knew she wanted to be a writer but took a slight detour along the way to train as a nurse, an experience that has found its way into many of her books. A lover of the outdoors, many of her story ideas come while hiking in wild places and she is also a keen photographer. She has been a published author for more than twenty years and lives near London, England where the rain frequently keeps her trapped in her office.
because you can scribble down a line of dialogue or a plot point and put it on the wall. It’s easy to move notes around and a great way to visualize your story.
Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?
Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?
Q. What compelled you to choose and settle on the genre you now write in?
Q. When did you begin to write seriously?
JW. I’m the second of four daughters born to Lois and Walt. My father’s family were (are) enrolled members of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Indians. My mother’s family was in the logging business and lived close to Gifford Pinchot State Park. I grew up in Tacoma, Washington.
Q. Do you enjoy writing in other forms (playwriting, poetry, short stories, etc.)? If yes, tell us about it.
TS. I have a new release coming in May, THREE SINS AND A SCOUNDREL. It’s the final (#6 full length book) in the Duchess Society series. It’s been a really great series for me and readers seem to love the heroes!
I was going through chemo again in 2019. My hair had grown back in, [at least I had hair at the moment]. but I was about to lose it for a second time – and within two months of this photo, I had none. I just got home from receiving a heavy dose of chemo at the hospital. 
stepped back further in time to the Civil War era. This is a morally complex story about the McBride family, subsistence farmers whose principles are brought to the foreground after their eldest son runs off to join the Confederacy after being influenced by his staunch Confederate grandfather. The father, Ennis, goes after his son, leaving his wife, Joetta, (my main character) to look after their younger son, and the farm. What follows is a harrowing time for her, and the rest of the family as she is bound to stand by their beliefs, and by doing so, becomes a pariah in the community.
DE. It looks . . . never-ending. It looks impossible. It looks like a fever dream. Chaotic. Messy. Dumb. I’m usually at a loss at the start. There are days/weeks of staring at nothing. Days/weeks of thinking, thinking, thinking. Trying to write, tossing it out, trying something else. It’s endless discussions with other writer friends. Eventually, a foundation, an inkling of THE idea comes. Then, it’s brick by brick through the first sentences, to the first paragraphs, and first pages. It’s getting through those 1,000 words a day goals. It’s self-editing, killing words, and birthing better ideas. Then comes the moment of angst when someone else reads it. Then the agent reads, and then the editor. There’s praying involved during the “others are reading it” phase. Lots of it. Then comes the polishing, (copy edits) honing, (first pass pages) and then, voila. Book!
