An Interview with Colin Garrison

By Barbara Sheridan, founder and director, the Alliance in the Struggle for Radiant Development (ASTRID)

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BS: Is Chet Fletcher an autobiographical character?

CG: Hi, Barbara. Nice to talk to you. I have two left feet and a tendency to swim around in my own head. Chet shares some of my preoccupations but is endowed with all sorts of handy physical prowess. The disconnect is less when you understand that Chet’s adventures are stand-ins for the kinds of spiritual and emotional challenges that I and many people experience in everyday life.

BS: One thing that’s striking about FRENCH TWIST is the tonal shifts. Sometimes it’s warm and playful, sometimes it’s swift and brutal.

CG: I was trying to make something that captured something of the emotional breadth of lived experience.

BS: You know, I’m not entirely thrilled by the way you’ve formatted this interview. It’s not much fun being referred to as “BS.”

CG: Sorry. What if I refer to us by our names instead of our initials?

Barbara: That’s much better, thank you. . . . You spend a lot of time in your novel describing aspects of the physical world. You realize that the novels that top the bestseller lists typically skip those parts?

Colin: I love that aspect of life. Ideally, those parts transport you to that place and make it more fun to read. Also, every setting can be seen as the analog of a psychological landscape.

Barbara: People divide novelists into “pantsers” and “planners.” Which are you?

Colin: Definitely a planner. Certain things need to be set up in advance to work.

Barbara: Describe the essence of your writing in ten words or less.

Colin: I don’t know, maybe, ramming together unrelated elements to create entertaining explosions.

Barbara: What is the purpose of a plot, in your opinion?

Colin: A plot is a machine designed to create emotion. That’s what I think, anyway. I guess someone else might say it’s a device for exploring a theme.

Barbara: What are the qualities it takes to write a novel like this?

Colin: You have to be part explorer, part psychologist, and part engineer. Also part mule.

Barbara: You don’t actually have any experience as a spy, you wouldn’t hurt a fly, and you’re not the least bit brave. What qualifies you to write a novel like this?

Colin: Well, it’s not really about being a spy. It’s really about being an artist. And beyond that, a human being.

Barbara: What are the main influences of FRENCH TWIST?

Colin: My own experiences imaginatively blown up to be bigger than life. The main cultural influences are a combination of the adventure stories I liked as a kid and the literary classics I discovered in college: Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, and books like that. I loved those because the inner lives of the main characters seemed to mirror my own in terms of richness. The world I actually lived in was impoverished in comparison.

Barbara: Culture today is so visual and frenetic. It seems few people care that much about the inner life of human beings, either their own or anyone else’s.

Colin: Movies are great but they don’t communicate very much about the inner experience of being alive, at least not very precisely or reliably.

Barbara: How comfortable are you with describing FRENCH TWIST as a thriller?

Colin: I love the classic thriller plot arc: A bad guy’s trying to do something evil and the good guy finds out and seeks to stop him. Everything comes together in a big climax and hands the reader catharsis on a plate. My stuff has that, but in other ways it strays from the conventions. As you mentioned above, the emotional range is pretty wide. The book isn’t the least bit macho or cynical. It’s also expressly in the service of enlightened ideas. My evil organization, LEOPARD, is a cabal of oligarchs trying to undermine democracy and ransack the planet. My good guys are trying to stop them.