INTERVIEW | Athol Dickson

Athol, describe yourself for our visitors.

I’m a pretty average guy. My wife, Sue, and are coming up on our 25th wedding anniversary, and trying to decide how to celebrate it. Maybe a trip to England and Scotland. We have no children, but we have two nieces and five nephews whom we love a lot. I go boating whenever I can, since I’ve loved boating and being out on the water ever since I was a kid. I also like to go for long, aimless drives. I enjoy fine art and have a little art collection, a few original oil paintings, charcoals, and pastels. Some day I want to buy more. I also read a lot, and have about a thousand books scattered all around the house.

My wife and I live walking distance from a beach, so we go down there a lot. We don’t have cable or satellite TV, because we think most of the programming is a waste of time. We rent a lot of videos instead. I saw The Kite Runner last week and thought it was fabulous. I taught a Sunday school class for adults for many years, but we moved to southern California from Texas last year, and I’m not teaching at our new church. I have a blog, where I mostly write about theology and Christian living.

How do you find time to connect with God?

Sue and I pray together every morning, and I talk to the Lord as the day goes along. I study the Bible with a group of wonderful men once a week, and of course there’s always church on Sundays. I love my church.

Who are your favorite authors? Favorite books?

I like so many authors, any list of “favorites” would be more of a list of those most on my mind at the moment. It would probably be a different list if you asked me again a week from now. But right now the first ones who come to mind are Ross Thomas, Elmore Leonard, E. L. Doctorow, Caleb Carr, Toni Morrison, Walker Percy, Charles Dickens, Patrick O’Brian, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain . . . I could go on all day. My favorite books are even harder to pinpoint. I love far too many to start a list. The best fairly new novel I’ve read in the last year was The Clearing, by Tim Gautreaux. It’s an undiscovered masterpiece. I wish Oprah would read it so Mr. Gautreaux would get the recognition he deserves.

Tell us about your journey to publication.

I was a very bored business owner, a partner in an architecture firm, and wanted some way to express myself creatively. Since I enjoy reading so much, I decided to try to write a little mystery novel in my spare time. Over the next couple of years, writing in the early morning and on weekends, I finished it. Several of my friends and family members read it and offered critiques, so I polished it for another year or so. One day I met an editor with the Dallas Morning News. We got to talking and I mentioned my novel. He asked to read it. A couple of months later he got back to me with a very detailed written critique. He said I was “verging on committing literature,” and offered to show it to another editor, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who had also published several true crime books. That second editor liked it also, and offered to show it to his agent in New York. The agent liked it, and took me on.

The novel had a slightly spiritual sub-theme, and each one of these three people had suggested that I give that aspect of the story more attention, so in rewrites over this time the spiritual aspect had slowly grown until it became the major theme. Then the agent got a major New York house to make an offer on the novel, but the publisher asked me to change “Jesus” to “God” throughout the novel in order to make it palatable for non-Christians. This was years before Mel Gibson’s movie or the Left Behind series, so publishers had no idea how hungry readers are for novels with spiritual and religious themes. After getting to that place—an offer from a major house without really trying—I felt their condition was a test. It was like God wanted to see if I would compromise my faith in order to get published. So I turned down the contract. That made the agent angry, so she dropped me, and after getting to that mountaintop I ended up coming down with nothing except a very well polished manuscript in a box in my closet.

I couldn’t figure out why God would let that happen, so I went to an old friend of mine, a minister, to see what he thought. As it happened, he had a friend who is widely published in the Christian world, and he asked if it would be okay to tell my story to his friend. His friend then talked to his agent about it, and suddenly I had yet another agent interested. This time, the agent sold the book to a Christian publishing company, and now here I am, many years later, writing novels full time.

Tell us about your current book?

It’s called Winter Haven. I think it will be available in stores and at Amazon.com and BarnesAndNobel.com around April 21. Here’s a blurb I wrote for my website: “Boys who never age, giants lost in time, mist that never rises, questions never asked…on the most remote of islands off the coast of Maine, history haunts the present and Vera Gamble wrestles with a past that will not yield. Will she find refuge there, or will her ghosts prevail on…Winter Haven.” Basically, the woman at the center of the story gets a call about her brother, whose body has washed up on a beach on a remote island off the cost of Maine. She hasn’t seen or heard from him for over a decade, but when she goes to claim the body, it turns out he hasn’t changed at all. After all that time he still looks like he’s fifteen years old. So she stays around the island to try to figure that out, and from there the plot thickens, as they say.

How did you come up with ideas for this book?

I start with a theme, a general idea I want to explore. For example, Winter Haven is about finding the courage to be honest in approaching God. The novel I’m working on right now is about situational ethics, and the temptation to hide from a frightening world within religious excess. When I have the theme, I start thinking about events and characters that might symbolize that theme. That usually leads me to ideas for the major scenes, and from there, I start adding in the minor scenes to connect the dots.

List your most recent books.

River Rising, The Cure, and Winter Haven.

River Rising won a Christy Award and was picked by Booklist as one of the top ten Christian novels of the year. Christianity Today magazine also picked it as a finalist for their novel of the year. The Cure was picked as one of the ten best novels of the year by Christian Fiction Review, and even though Winter Haven is not out yet, it has already been named as a “Top Pick” by Romantic Times magazine.

What’s next for you?

The novel I mentioned about situational ethics and religious excess has the working title, Lost Mission. It’s something of an epic story, which begins in the mountains of Mexico and travels north to southern California. There are three main characters: a wealthy guy who wants to develop some land into a kind of haven for Christians only, a Mexican woman who enters the USA illegally as a self-appointed missionary because she thinks America is filled with lost souls who need the gospel, and another missionary who steals to support the poor when rich people refuse to give tithes to his ministry. All of this takes place in a setting that includes a plague and a lost Spanish mission in the hills near L.A.. It should be out in late 2009.

Where can visitors find you online?

My website address is www.atholdickson.com . My blog is at http://whatatholwrote.blogspot.com/ .

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