Author Interview with Sunny Lockwood

Hello Everyone,
Happy Valentine's Day! Here on "Art, Books, Tea," I've decided to start a new feature of author interviews. My first interview is with author, blogger and newspaper writer, Sunny Lockwood, whose ebook "Shades of Love, Stories From the Heart" is available on Amazon.com. Just in time for Valentine's Day, Sunny is offering the book for only .99! It would make a great gift for your loved ones - or a treat for yourself! If you don't have a Kindle, or other e-reader, no problem. You can read them right on your computer by downloading a free app from Amazon by clicking HERE.  Now, on with the interview!  

Q: Where do you live?

A. I live with my husband in the Gold Rush foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in north-central California. We have 22 acres that look out (this time of year) on the snowy peaks of the high Sierra.

 

 

Q. Did you always want to be a writer?

A. I've always liked reading. My mother read to me when I was too young to read to myself. As soon as I could read, I was taking out stacks of books from the library.  One day when I was about 15 years old, I was in the city library, just wandering among the stacks of books and my eye came upon a little orange hard-back book with the title: How to write and sell fact and fiction. Until that moment I'd never thought much about writing as an occupation. But the moment I realized people actually got paid to write, I started writing and sending my work off. Within a year I was being published. There's something pretty affirming about receiving a check for a story or article that you've researched and written. My work has been published in Good Housekeeping, Ms, New Woman, Self, The Chronicle of Higher Education and numerous smaller magazines and dozens of newspapers up and down the West Coast. And now I'm publishing on the Internet. And meeting all kinds of interesting writers and readers. How wonderful is that!

Q. What inspired you to write Shades of Love, Stories From the Heart?

A. I put together this ebook as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could do a book of short stories that people would like to read. I've made a living writing nonfiction..and this was sort of an exciting step away from that and into the creativity of fiction. The book has received such heart-warming reviews & comments from readers that I'm thrilled!

Q. How did you come up with the title?

A. Each story in the collection is significantly different from all the others. There's a story about a lonely career woman seeking love, a story about a domineering mother and her shy daughter and their boundary issues, a story about a long marriage that is coming to an end, a story about a settled and loving marriage and so on. And the core of each story is love...how love works out the challenges life presents. So as I tried to come up with a title that indicated both the variety of stories and the common theme of them all, I thought "Shades of Love" was perfect. But then I wanted people to know it was a short-story collection, not a novel, so I added the subtitle "stories from the heart."

Q. Who are some of your favorite authors?

A. I have oodles. I think Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of the finest writers of the 20th Century. Although her books are considered children's books..they are fascinating and educational for anyone who dips into them. I love the work of Loren Eiseley and Carl Sagan and Rachel Carson (although they're all non fiction writers). For short stories, I love Flannery O'Connor, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Anne Porter. For more contemporary writers, my husband and I have enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith, Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Lamott. In my early adulthood, I was very inspired by the Irish writer George Target. He lived in England, wrote for the BBC & he wrote novels that were published in the UK. He liked my writing a lot and we carried on quite a lively correspondence for a few brief years (before he died). His encouragement went a long way in helping me develop my work.

Thank you very much, Sunny, for this interview! To visit Sunny Lockwood's website, click HERE. To order her book, "Shades of Love, Stories From the Heart," click on the book icon below.

Until next time,

Cindy
Linking to the special Valentine's Day Pink Saturday on How Sweet the Sound!
                                and A Woman Thing: The Link Party at Whimsical Musings!