Please welcome friend and author, D J Swykert...

... to my blog today.  Hi David, and thanks very much for making time in your busy schedule to be here.  So, tell me what is your latest release?

DS  Lebo, released in June 2020 which I edited and co-wrote portions of it with a young African writer from Botswana.  The latest release solely written by me is For the Love of Wolves, released in May 2019.

AW   What first got you into writing and why?

DS  I started writing poetry in my late teens to impress an art student I was dating.  I couldn’t draw a stick figure so I decided to try my hand at writing.

AW  You write in a number of different genres.  Is there one particular genre that you feel most at ease with and why?

DS  I worked in law enforcement for quite a while, so mystery and crime stories come easiest for me.  I worked on many cases with unsavory characters, I’ll never run out of bad guys to put into my stories.

AW  Lucky you!  The oft quoted mantra is write what you know. To what extent does your experience as a 911 operator bleed into your work?

DS  Most of the characters in my stories are fictionalized versions of real characters I have encountered.  My favorite cop is Benham, a female homicide detective, who is modeled after a female officer in our department.

AW  Famous authors, such as Roald Dahl and Dylan Thomas, had a special space for writing.  Do you have a writing ‘shed’ of your own?

DS  I have an office on the bottom floor of our Mid-Century Modern home.  When I lived in northern Michigan I used a plant room that was off of our dining room.

AW  Finally, if you had a whole afternoon to yourself and could choose to spend it with any one individual, living or dead or a character from a book, who would it be, and what would you want to discuss?

DS  Albert Einstein.  My favorite quote of his, of which there are many, but this one I like the best: Imagination is greater than knowledge.  I’d love to ask him what he thinks of the 21^st century.

about the author… DJ Swykert is a fiction writer and former 911 operator. His work has appeared in The Tampa Review, Detroit News, Monarch Review, Lunch Ticket, Gravel, Coe Review, Sand Canyon Review, Zodiac Review, The Newer York, Barbaric Yawp and Bull. His books include The Pool Boy’s Beatitude, Children of the Enemy, Alpha Wolves, Maggie Elizabeth Harrington, For the Love of Wolves and The Death of Anyone. He is a self-proclaimed wolf expert.

 

about the book…  My name is Lebo. I am six years old and my mother is dying. They brought her home from the clinic in a wheelbarrow. She’s fragile and ashen, and looked at me with painful eyes as they unloaded her off the wheelbarrow. They laid her on a mattress in my aunt’s sitting room and left her alone there. It’s about four pm and the village was quiet except for the cries and howling of pain from my mother. It’s dark and cloudy and the day is gloomy, the atmosphere matched the mood of the home.

You can get his books on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble 

  

 
You can follow David on his  Website Facebook Twitter and on Instagram