Interview with Carew Papritz on The Dark Phantom Review
Carew Papritz, Author of The Legacy Letters, was interviewed on The Dark Phantom Review on September 7th, 2014. Here is the first question and answer from the interview:
Q: Congratulations on the release of your latest book, The Legacy Letters. What was your inspiration for it?
A: The inspiration behind The Legacy Letters?—I had an early mid-life crisis. I wasn’t in need of a new wife and a Cadillac. (Besides, I wasn’t married and I drove an old beat-up Chevy.) What I needed was the opportunity to take my soul out for a long, long walk. While working in Hollywood on feature films in the art department, I realized that the celluloid bright-lights lifestyle I was living was making me materially richer but spiritually depleted. The long journey back to reclaim my soul began with a series of “drive-abouts” throughout the Western United Sates and ended up in a small bar in Southern Arizona. I asked an old cowboy if there was any work nearby and he told me about a fencing job “far from the heck and gone.”
Thirty miles by dirt road and with not a house in sight, I ended up at my job on the open range putting up post holes and barbed wire fence—mostly alone and for days on end. Twenty-five years had gone by since I had last seriously picked up the pen, and like a god-given divining rod, that pen roared back to life. For six months, I worked by day, washing in a horse trough, cooking by campfire, and living in a tent. At night, I wrote by lantern light on the back of my pickup.
In a sense, I had come full circle. When I was growing up, my grandfather had a small ranch in Washington State. And now, here I was, back on a ranch, working as a cowboy in the high mountains of the Great Sonoran Desert. Imagine a place where the stars are so bright at night that they almost hurt your eyes. Imagine not seeing a soul for days on end. Imagine what true quiet is—the noise of wind and rain, coyotes and birds, grass rustling and the chink of the pickaxe against the hard soil.
I had come back “home” to write this book. This is where I reclaimed my soul and began the life I was always supposed to live—but never knew quite how to find. Only by giving up the security of everything I knew could I then begin to discover everything I was meant to know. The Legacy Letters was the genesis of this amazing journey that I am continuing, even to this present day.
Link to the Complete Interview with Carew Papritz on The Dark Phantom Review: http://thedarkphantom.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/interview-with-carew-papritz-author-of-the-legacy-letters/