Today is my stop on the blog tour for Fire on the Island by Timothy Jay Smith. I have an interview with the author today and if you like the sound of that, you can click here to order your copy now. Don't forget to check out the other stops on the tour for more exclusive content and reviews.
Here's what it's all about...
FIRE ON THE ISLAND is a playful, romantic thriller set in contemporary Greece, with a gay Greek-American FBI agent, who is undercover on the island to investigate a series of mysterious fires. Set against the very real refugee crisis on the beautiful, sun-drenched Greek islands, this novel paints a loving portrait of a community in crisis. As the island residents grapple with declining tourism, poverty, refugees, family feuds, and a perilously damaged church, an arsonist invades their midst.
Nick Damigos, the FBI agent, arrives on the island just in time to witness the latest fire and save a beloved truffle-sniffing dog. Hailed as a hero and embraced by the community, Nick finds himself drawn to Takis, a young bartender who becomes his primary suspect, which is a problem because they’re having an affair. Theirs is not the only complicated romance in the community and Takis isn’t the only suspicious character on the island. The priest is an art forger, a young Albanian waiter harbors a secret, the captain of the coast guard station seems to have his own agenda, and the village itself hides a violent history. Nick has to unravel the truth in time to prevent catastrophe, as he comes to terms with his own past trauma. In saving the village, he will go a long way toward saving himself.
A long time devotee of the Greek islands, Smith paints the setting with gorgeous color and empathy, ushering in a new romantic thriller with the charm of Zorba the Greek while shedding bright light on the very real challenges of life in contemporary Greece.
Here's that interview for you...
First question-bit of a cliche-how did you get into writing?
It’s not a cliché at all. I think
every writer arrives at the craft following a different path.
I’ve always enjoyed the writing
aspect of any job or task I had to do. I selected college courses
that would require a paper at the end, not an exam. My love of
writing probably grew from my love of reading. As a child, I was an
avid reader, so it’s not so surprising that I wrote my first play
when I was about ten years old, and started a novel when I was
twelve.
As I got older, of course I had to
think about what I was going to do in terms of a real job. From an
early age, I developed a strong sense of social and economic justice,
including organizing civil rights events in high school, and
eventually devoted myself to a career working on economic development
projects to help lower income people, first in the US and then
internationally.
I’ve always been goal-oriented, and
in that career, ultimately my goal evolved into designing and
managing an overseas project that had some real significance. That
happened. I directed the U.S. Government’s first significant
project to assist Palestinians after the start of the peace process.
When that project ended, I was 46 years old and had accomplished what
I had set out to achieve in that career. Anything else felt like it
would be redundant.
I also had a story to tell. I had grown
up a Zionist (though I’m not Jewish) and ended my career helping
Palestinians. I knew, understood, and appreciated the many dimensions
of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and felt compelled to write
about it. That became my first novel, A Vision of Angels. It’s
a story about reconciliation which this excerpt (a story told at
seder dinner) makes abundantly clear:
http://www.timothyjaysmith.com/tims-blog/2016/10/31/stolen-memories.
Do you write full time & if so,
have you always done this?
Yes, I do write full-time, if you
include all the tasks that go into writing: research, editing,
publicity and marketing. It’s more than a full-time job. But as I
mentioned earlier, I worked as an advisor/ project designer/finance
analyst on projects benefitting low income people all over the US and
in thirty-three countries! (I’ve actually been to 112 countries,
many of them several times.) I rely on these experiences to find the
stories and characters I want to write about. My more or less
official bio describes it this way:
“Raised crisscrossing America pulling
a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith
developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world
many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his
work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers,
child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian
tailors: he’s hung with them all in an unparalleled international
career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron
Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at
the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a
‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that
landed him in an African jail.”
Do you have a particular writing
style or genre that you prefer to write?
I write what I like to read: books that
combine suspenseful plots with interesting characters. But before I
get even that far, I always ask myself: what do I want to write about
in terms of illuminating issues that concern me? So I take an issue
and decide how to best dramatize it—because ultimately, my storiers
are about how a suspenseful situation affects the people touched by
it. My newest release, Fire on the Island, is both an hommage
to Greece (where I have spent cumulatively some seven years), as well
as a story of how one Greek village is coping with concurrent fiscal
and refugee crises—when an arsonist suddenly drops into their
midst.
My style tends to be fast-paced, bright
with dialogue, and not overburdened with too much self-analysis. Of
my four published novels, three have been written from the POV of
multiple characters whom the story brings together in a tightening
circle or plot. The fourth, Cooper’s Promise, is written
entirely from one character’s perspective, and you, the reader,
only knows as much as he knows. In the first approach (an ‘open
mystery’), the reader might know that there’s a boogie man in the
next room before a character goes into it, but in the second approach
(a ‘closed mystery’), you discover the boogie man at the same
time as the main character. Both have their challenges and benefits,
which is why I go between the two apporaches.
How much of you is reflected in your
writing?
A lot, certainly when it comes to my
protagonists. I can’t imagine any writer not agreeing that we
constantly plumb ourselves, not always consciously, for almost every
story and character we create. When I think about what a character
might fear, or how s/he might torture someone, or what s/he might
find annoying, of course it has to be organic to how that character
has already been portrayed, but I also ask myself: what would I do?
Or fear the most?
Cooper’s Promise is a good
example of that. Cooper, a deserter from the war in Iraq who’s
adrift in Africa, would like to go home but can’t because he knows
he’ll be thrown in jail—and he’s highly claustrophobic. So am
I.
But it’s more complex than that. I
will probably botch retelling this scene in Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf, but it’s how I have always remembered it.
Hesse’s main character enters the magic theater, and at some
moment, a mirror shatters, and in each shard his character sees a
different part of himself. Sometimes when I’ve written something
about a character, I realize: that’s a shard from me. It’s an
“Aha!” moment of self-recognition.
How do you develop your characters
as you write? Are any of them based on real people?
All the major characters are inspired
by people I know, and sometimes the minor characters, too. By
inspire, I mean by a character trait, perhaps an attitude, or
sometimes a particular voice. I don’t take them in totality. I take
pieces of them—shards, like I described earlier—that I nurture
and add to, until I have a fully developed character. As my story
develops, that also influences how my characters develop.
What was the inspiration behind your
book?
My first job after college was in
Greece working for a national sociology research institute. Over the
intervening forty-some years, I have returned to Greece many times,
which has added up to my spending some seven years of my life in the
country. For the last fifteen years, I have gone at least once a year
to the island of Lesvos, which is where Fire on the Island is
set. (Because of the pandemic, this is the first year I will likely
not go to Lesvos.)
Several things coincided that gave me
the idea for Fire on the Island. Over a period of several
months, a real arsonist had set small brush fires on the northern
part of the island. About that time, the refugee crisis escalated. I
personally became involved in helping, but the real heros were the
Greeks who, still reeling from a national fiscal crisis, pitched in
with everything they had to help the refegees landing daily by the
hundreds—and then the thousands—on their rocky shores. Fire on
the Island is not a refugee story per se, but a story of how a
Greek village manages to survive one catastrophe after another.
What is your writing process-do you
plan it out first? Write a bit at a time?
First I decide “why” I want to
write a particular story. In my first novel, A Vision of Angels,
it was to portray the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in a balanced way.
The protagonist is a photojournalist who wants to put a human face on
the intractable Middle East conflict. In Cooper’s Promise,
at its heart is a story about human trafficking. A deserter from the
war in Iraq vows to save a 14-year-old girl trafficked into
prostitution to redeem himself for a promise he couldn’t keep to
his sister earlier in his life. Once I know that much about a story,
I can visualize opening and closing scenes, and I’m ready to start
writing.
As I make progress, and fill out my
characters and story, I keep notes that become the basis of a very
detailed outline. It helps me keep track of what I’ve written,
where I’ll find crucial events in my story, and what I still need
to write. It’s an outline that is constantly evolving.
What kind of research did you have
to do before/during writing behind your book?
So far, all of my novels are in
international settings that I know well. Not just visited but know
well enough to authentically characterize it. Of course, there are
always things that I still need to research: historical dates and
events, meanings of characters’ names, and other simple things for
which the internet is perfect.
There’s one story I especially like
to tell. My last published novel, The Fourth Courier, which I
drafted and set aside before 9/11, involves smuggling a portable
atomic bomb out of the failed Soviet Union through Poland to an
unknown destination. I decided I needed to know how to build an
atomic bomb—weight, size, basic design, fuel—and the internet
wasn’t robust enough yet to provide that information. So, I called
the U.S. Department of Energy, explained my project, and some young
scientist—eager to share his knowledge—agreed to meet with me on
the weekend at a coffeeshop in Rockville, MD. Our conversation
started in line waiting to place our orders, and continued at a table
where he spread out sketches of different designs for an atomic
device, told me how much enriched uranium would be required,
described the requirements of a detonator, and so on. For the same
novel, I also managed to organize a private tour of the FBI’s
training site in Quantico, VA.
It’s really unfathomable that I was
able to do that kind of research. I think it would be impossible in
today’s security-conscious world.
How much attention do you pay to the
reviews that you get?
I read them, but I don’t fret about
them. Most have been good to great, and I share them. It’s nice
when a reviewer comments on somewthing, and I can say, “S/he really
got it!”
Are friends and family supportive of
your writing?
100%.
How do you feel leading up to your
publication day?
In three words: frazzled, overworked,
and exhausted. Despite having an excellent publisher and publicist,
there’s still so much work for an author to do before publication.
The internet provides an endless source of promotional opportunities.
I tend to interact with book bloggers, and most things gay since I’m
more attuned to that world. I’m also asked to respond to
pre-release interviews, write pithy essays, and participate in some
gimmicky stuff which is fun but still takes time. I start all of that
stuff five to six months prior to publication. My publicist does the
heavy lifting with the important media about three months prior to
publication, but her efforts also generate follow-up tasks for me.
The hardest thing for me is to find time to pursue new writing.
Which other authors inspire you or
are there any you particularly enjoy reading?
Something very surprising happened with
The Fourth Courier, my novel published last year, which has a
straight protagonist, but also a black gay CIA agent who becomes the
real hero of the story. The gay community embraced it for having a
gay action hero, not a gay stereotype. In fact, that novel is
currently a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary
Awards!
When my publisher asked for my help in
identifying authors to write blurbs for the cover of Fire on the
Island, in which the protagonist is gay, I checked out past
finalists and winners of the Lammy Awards, and discovered a whole
slew of really fine writers. I’ve not read them all (yet), but I am
enormously impressed with Leading Men by Christopher
Castellani, a fictionalized account of the longtime love affair
between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo.
I’ve always enjoyed the books of
Graham Greene, John LeCarré and Ernest Hemingway. Since reviewers
have compared me to all three, I think it’s fair to say they
inspired me. I love anything by Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the
Greek) and Robert Goolrick (A Reliable Wife), and anything
non-science fiction by Doris Lessing. In the last few years, three
books that completely knocked me off my feet were Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell, The Illuminaries by Eleanor Catton, and
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent.
Finally...what are you working on
right now?
I’m never at a loss for ideas for
novels or essays. About 18 months ago, when I knew I was close to
finishing Fire on the Island, I began to consider which book
to write next. I’m 16th generation American, have always
been proud of my heritage, have a great story in mind, but when I
started to really think about it—to really sense it—I realized I
am full of disappointment and anger about what has happened to my
country. I didn’t want to be in that frame of mind for the next
couple of years. So, I’ve shelved that book idea for the time
being, as well as a dystopian novel set in Paris for the same reason:
just too depressing. (Fire on the Island, by the way, is
lighthearted enough to be the perfect balm for the difficult times we
are living.)
I mentioned earlier that, for a couple
of years, I was very active in helping refugees arriving in Greece,
and I knew pretty much everything that happened to them from the
minute they landed in their rafts until they reached their final
destination somewhere in northern Europe. What I didn’t know was
how they got to Istanbul and eventually onto a raft to make the
crossing to Greece. I decided to find out, took two trips to Turkey,
and am well into a novel about a young gay Syrian refugee struggling
to survive in Istanbul. His main goal is to stay safe, but that
becomes a challenge when, in the same 24 hours, he’s recruited by
both the CIA and ISIS to be a spy.
Called The Syrian Pietà , it’s
a very exciting piece of work on many levels. But that’s all I’m
going to say about it.
About The Author
Tim has traveled the world collecting stories and characters for his novels and screenplays which have received high praise. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel. He won the Paris Prize for Fiction for his first book, A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called Cooper's Promise "literary dynamite" and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012. Tim was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize for his short fiction, "Stolen Memories." His recent novel, The Fourth Courier received tremendous reviews. His screenplays have won numerous international competitions. Tim is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater. He lives in France.
