Jim Cheney

Writing for me is a necessity. Pure and simple. It’s a way to make sense of the non-sensical — a means of cataloging memories into characters whose lives are a hybrid of imagination, experience, and exploration. It’s often times a very lonely and isolating task, while at the same time liberating in that it opens my thinking to broader interpretations that I hope will cohesively make up a good story.

I have been writing since I was in high school. Poems, songs, professional communications. The dull stuff like memos, press releases, media pitches, etc. After 50 years, I can’t remember when I was not writing, either through words or the creative process of idea formulation. All of that spawned from a love for reading, a pastime I learned from my mother who constantly had her head in a book. You might say that it was a genetic calling. My influences are all over the map from Robert Penn Warren, and Stephen King to Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Dostoevsky. John Irving, Adrian McKinty, Elmore Leonard, T. S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Tana French, Peter Temple, James Joyce, Phillip Roth, Dennis Lehane, George V. Higgins, Alan Glynn, Tim O'Brian, Nick Cave, Russell Banks, Kevin Barry … you get the picture.

Yet this passion for the craft of writing is not of my own choosing. It is something I feel compelled to undertake, and when I’m not working at it, I feel a sense of guilt, as if I had locked these imaginary people in a closet and they were slowly running out of air, banging furiously on the door to be let out and go on about their lives. I was in my late forties before I was mature and patient enough to tackle a novel, and when I was done with the first one, I was immediately onto the next, having discovered that my muse was finally able to wander without constraint.