Lane Heymont is the author of The Freedman and The Pharaoh’s Staff (Sunbury Press/February 2013). Inspired by Frederick Douglass and the slave narratives passed down by his parents as well as stories of the Holocaust, Heymont explores the damaging effects of racism in past, present and future, but that also addresses the lack of minority and mixed race characters in the fantasy genre by introducing a diverse palette of characters torn between encrusted beliefs and the healing power of unity when we rise beyond prejudice to fight for freedom, equality, and human dignity against all odds.
Here’s his WWFIL:
When I Fell In Love – Lane Heymont
I could blame my love of writing on a lot of things: my family’s determined value of education, a need to tell the stories jockeying for room in my mind, or a lack of want to find a “real” job. Maybe it’s all of those, but the real reason was far less romantic.
When I was kid my grandfather paid me to read. That’s right. Five dollars for every classic I read. He offered Ivanhoe first, because he knew I loved medieval history. After reading the absurdly long novel I promptly told him how much I hated it. Suffice it to say, I read a lot of the classics of great literature such as The Iliad, Don Quixote, A Tale of Two Cities, which I also hated, and too many others to try and bore you with.
Then I found out my grandfather wrote a number of books, mostly military manuals and memoirs about his experiences fighting during World War II. A collection of letters he sent to my grandmother while overseeing the largest Jewish DP camp was even featured in the Holocaust Museum. Being the obnoxious, challenging kid I was, I informed him I would write a book and it’d be far better than all of his put together. I might have been seven at the time. Looking back, I’m surprised he didn’t slap the bejeebus out of me.
In school the next year we had to write a story, which would be bound and presented as a book. I wrote a story about my toys coming to life and dragging me into their world. Of course, I became king and all my toys loved me. The arrogance of eight-year-olds, huh?
When I presented my grandfather a cheaply bound, ten-page book about toys worshipping me as their god I was certain I’d beaten him. I can’t remember his exact response, but I’m sure it was akin to the way a grandfather would laugh in his grandson’s face. All I do remember was he told me, “Writing a book is hard”. Which I now take to mean, “Cut the crap”.
That’s how my love of writing all started—a half-ass, jokester way of connecting with my grandfather—but what kept me writing? It was Don Quixote. A farcical tale fueled a furnace of creativity. You could say I took on the imagination of Don Quixote, a middle aged man lost in boredom. In the twilight of his years, he set out on adventures to battle nefarious creatures…or windmills, but his wanderlust was infectious. I, too, began taking observations of the mundane and reshaping them into the fantastic.
My paternal grandparents lived in Quincy, Massachusetts. Many weekends my family would drive up to visit for the day. The entryway to the duplex they owned had a distinct scent I can only assign to them. Though I smelt it in a number of places, as I grew older, it was still their aroma. That entry was a strange otherworld. Its walls were covered in gaudy gold wallpaper that seemed to glow like the sun even in the dead of night.
What I remember most, however, was the drive home at night. I kept my eyes locked on the window, watching headlights bob in the darkness like fireflies. Maybe it was a game to stave off boredom, as Don Quixote played, but I conjured up descriptions of the world passing by me. The way the trees, beyond the sound barriers, swayed in the evening wind. How driving through those extended overpasses changed the tone of the world around me—deeper, almost like a crummy subwoofer in some decked out car.
Being eight or nine-years-old, I fought to keep the words in my head, so when we got home I could scribble them down. But, being eight or nine-years-old, I almost always forgot them. Since then I’ve always carried a notepad with me to write down ideas as soon as they struck me. Cell phones have made keeping notes much easier, though.
In the end, there are a lot of things to blame for my passion with words. The best I can sum it up as is my need to express myself, and words are the only way I know how.
