Author Interview – Ian Truman @iantruman

What motivates you to write?
I get angry if I don’t. It’s that simple. And I mean I get pissed. I have these stories in me and I need to let them out, I need to write them down. It sounds cheesy, some people might not get the feeling, but like most art forms, it’s there in your guts when it’s there in your guts and if you don’t let it out, well you won’t sleep. You can lose a lot of sleep over art.
What writing are you most proud of?
The thing I am the most proud of has not been published yet (and probably won’t for a good while). The title is Lily and the Vultures. It’s a collaborative work with my wife (Mary Lee Maynard – a visual artist), a graphic novel basically. And we have the six books outlined and I barely started the writing for it but all the concepts, characters, worlds and most of the early art work is down on paper. Imagine a combination of Spirited Away, Tekkonkinkreet, Fables and Mirrormask.
It’s really hard to nail the visuals we want to go for and we don’t want to sell the project short by not doing the visuals the way we want to. Long story short, we would need a much larger workshop. So one day we’ll be able to finance it or self-finance it. It’s just not a priority right now because of the money, basically.
What are you most proud of in your personal life?
I don’t settle on “pride” and look back at what I did in the past as some justification for what I’m doing now. Jacob Bannon (the singer from Converge) calls it “Forward movement.” The idea of always creating, always setting up new projects. When something works out, I admire it, I appreciate it. And when it’s said and done, I try to look for new projects or opportunities.
What books did you love growing up?
I loved sci-fi and fantasy as a kid. Not that much today, but it’s cool, I guess. I remember I was in high school and I read stuff like Jurassic Park, the Andromeda Strain. The library somehow didn’t have The Lord of The Rings so the librarian game me this thing called “The Shannara Trilogy” by Terry Brooks and for the longest time I had no Idea The Lord of The Rings existed and didn’t know the Shannara was, let’s say, only a “lookalike.”
Who is your favorite author?
A Playwright from Montreal called David Fennario. He does flawless working-class/bilingual plays. I mostly know his early work (On The Job, Nothing To Lose, Balconville). I also like Mordecai Richler a lot. He’s a writer from Montreal and his satire and dialogues are unparalleled. The rest is regular stuff: Bukowski, Hemingway, Faulkner, Burroughs…

“All they really wanted to do was fuck around, be creative, listen to music, skateboard or go to shows. People kept telling them growing up was supposed to be tough but it’s not like they didn’t know that already. Timmy had listened. Timmy had finished school and got himself a job. That didn’t stop him from running his van into a pillar one night so what was the fucking use? Nobody seemed to have an answer.“

Conor and his friends are growing up in a one factory town where the most likely employment prospect is the assembly line or the farmer’s coop. Aiming higher than the local college, Conor finds himself spending more and more time in downtown Montreal, discovering himself through punk and hardcore music. But as his girlfriend wants nothing to do with the city and his friend Jake loses his brother when the factory closes, Conor’s ambitions could require him to burn bridges he might not be ready to burn.

With A Teenage Suicide, Ian wanted to write a story about kids making decisions and kids making mistakes. Stylistically, it is fair to mention influences of Truman Capote and Mordecai Richler. Imagine of the “cold-hard-fact” descriptions of In Cold Blood mixed with the realistic and witty dialogue of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

Ian Truman is a hardcore kid turned writer. He proudly claims to be from a working class family and has been straight edge and vegetarian for at least a decade now. He hopes to bring the passion, verve and dedication of hardcore into the art form of the novel. Born and raised in Montreal, he is a graduate of Concordia University’s creative writing program. A Teenage Suicide is his third novel.

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Genre - Literary, Coming of Age

Rating – PG13

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Website http://www.iantruman.com