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MEET DOUGLAS REES (3/2011)
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Douglas Rees

I remember being happiest when I was playing imaginative games, pretending to be something I wasn’t, or in another time. My friends and I had some sense of history, so we would be knights, or Civil War soldiers or dinosaurs. I was okay at sports, but I could never get interested in them. Something about balls just fails to intrigue me. I suspect the impulse to tell stories may spring from the same root source that drove my boyhood play.

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

Tough one. I think my first literary influence was the comic books of Walt Kelly’s POGO, which came out quarterly and cost an extra nickel – fifteen cents, not ten. Kelly’s wild humor and his way with language were several cuts above anything else anyone was doing, even Carl Barks, and I think my love of language and of humor was stimulated by these. But I don’t think I was actually influenced by any other stories until much later when I was a teenager. Certainly I remember many books that I read over and over again: KNIGHT’S CASTLE, by Edward Eager; THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET, by Eleanor Cameron; any of Walter R. Brooks’s Freddy the Pig stories, especially FREDDY AND SIMON THE DICTATOR. WINNIE-THE-POOH. THE JUNGLE BOOKS. But I don’t think any of these, except perhaps the last, had any special role in molding me as POGOdefinitely did.

When you were a child did you ever have moments when you decided that you were going to be a writer when you grew up?

I can remember exactly when I decided to become a writer. I was sitting in the back seat of the family car, driving to the Marcy Branch Library in Riverside, California, and I was twelve. I realized, all of a sudden, that I was never going to become a paleontologist because I didn’t want to do field work. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll be a writer instead.” And I am.

Have any of your fiction stories been about real people or events?

I think all of my stories have been about real people and events. For example, Kestrel Murphy in MAJIX is based on a girl I knew thirty years ago in Riverside, though I never realized it until a few months ago. The elaborate school in VAMPIRE HIGH is the school I attended when I was an Air Force kid in Germany, just made ridiculously posh – though I didn’t realize that until several years after the book was published. More often, though, I make a conscious decision to include real people and places. The red werewolf in VAMPIRE HIGH is my wife, JoAnn. The characters in Uncle Pirate are named for my cats Jack, Wilson, and Bob. And of course in the three historical novels John Brown, Paul Gauguin, and John Singer Sargent are all men who lived and have been written about extensively.

What really triggers your imagination?

I don’t think anybody knows when his imagination will go off, or what will trigger it. I have had ideas for three of my books when I was doing routine tasks at my library job, not even thinking about writing. Or it may be something I read. Most recently, I was driving through Indiana during a storm and I heard this weird wailing sound start. I can’t compare it to anything else I’ve ever heard. The person I was with explained that these were tornado warning sirens. So, okay, we got to the hotel and there was no tornado that night. But later, alone in my room, I wrote this sentence: No one knew where the dragons had come from, or why they had come, or if they would ever leave.” I don’t know if those sirens were the voices of dragons to me, or if I think Indiana should have dragons so that teens can fight them. But it’s an idea.

Was your first book accepted immediately? Or did you experience a number of rejections?

I have every rejection slip I ever got, going back to the 1970’s. And I still get rejected, often. It’s part of the job of getting accepted. If you’re a mechanic like my dad was, you don’t expect that every sick car in town is going to come to your shop to get well. Why would you expect every book you write to get published?

What was your first job after you graduated from college?

Pumping gas at my dad’s service station. The early 70’s were a tough time for people with advanced degrees.

How soon after that was your first book published?

Twenty-seven years.

Do you work on more than one book at a time?

Usually. And I also write short plays.