Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "marathon"

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Interview with Dan Truitt, author of ‘Spartan’s Daughter’.
By Paul Alkazraji, author of The Silencer

Tell us a little about yourself.

My full name is Daniel Perry Truitt. My maternal grandfather was a Greek immigrant to the US named Periandros Harbelis, or Perry for short. I was born in 1954 and raised in the Chicago suburbs. I grew up Catholic, became an atheist and a hippie around 1970, and then became a Christian in 1984 after studying the book of Acts. That was while simultaneously following Anthony Hopkins in a little-known role of his as St. Paul in Peter and Paul, a teleplay broadcast during Holy Week 1984. Shortly after that, I determined that I had been called to Greece. My best friend in the US jokes that I “came to Greece to give the Greeks the Bible in their own language.”

Tell us about your new book.

Spartan’s Daughter is the story of a nineteen year-old girl who leaves Sparta, her native city-state, because her options there as a woman are limited. According to Spartan tradition, she must submit in marriage to the first man who can successfully ‘kidnap’ her! So she travels only at night, by foot, to Athens, where she has a great-uncle who will look after her. She doesn’t know that he is seriously ill and will be dead by the time she arrives. It’s the first of September, 490 BC. On the ninth of September, the battle of Marathon will be fought. She’ll be the only Spartan, and the only woman, to participate, albeit in a very small but very crucial way. Spartan’s Daughter is primarily a love story, with some adventure, a little violence, and some history thrown in.

Is there an aspect of it you are particularly pleased with?

One thing that turned out in a way I really liked and didn’t expect was the way the characters talked and acted. I’ve been in Greece nearly 25 years and I know how Greeks think and act, and why. It was easy transferring those behaviour patterns to 490 BC. After all, Greece has one of the longest unbroken cultural lines in world history. I actually got this idea from Woody Allen, in his movie Mighty Aphrodite. He opens the film with a classical face mask-wearing Greek chorus and narrator, but in the background he’s playing modern bouzouki music. I thought that was really clever.

Share with us a sentence of your choice from it.

This one illustrates the way I have Greeks thinking about their gods. Morpheus is the god of dreams. Kalliope, the main character, is dreaming. She knows that Morpheus is the man running the projector of her dreams:

“To Kalliope, Morpheus was rather like an insane but brilliant artist who was constantly coming up with bizarre situations and pictures which no one else possibly could.”

Tell us about something you like or dislike in one of your characters.

Something I like: I have the male protagonist, an Athenian mercenary named Alexandros, not be flawlessly handsome. He would be so were it not for a deep, nasty scar running from his eyebrow down through the bridge of his nose from an opponents’ sword. In moments of distress his hand goes to this scar and touches it.

Fiction writers put characters in dramatic situations ultimately to ‘say’ something. What are you saying in your latest work?

I don’t like Christian fiction in most of its modern forms. By the same token there is great need for Christian verities (true principles) to be subtly taught in the arts the same way godless atheism is. So this is an attempt to do this. I’m talking about those like physical and moral courage, sexual fidelity, and a love of the freedom our Creator gave us to be who we are. But even then I tried to tone it down a little and make this primarily a love/adventure story. I can’t stand didactic fiction, which is my main problem with Christian fiction. The only Christian novel I would give to a non-believer is Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love, which is a beautiful 19th century take on the prophet Hosea and his unfaithful prostitute wife.

How does your faith influence your writing?

I’ve understood that God gave me storytelling and descriptive abilities to help people grasp what existence is all about. Our goal as Christians is to ultimately bring glory to our Maker. There is absolutely no point to my writing a single sentence if Biblical values do not percolate through it.

What aspect of the craft of writing do you find most enjoyable?

Watching a first draft unfold. It’s a blast, as long as you know how things will end. A second enjoyable thing is just playing with my imagination, watching two disparate ideas collide and create the germ of a story.

What books or authors do you like to read?

I love my Kindle. I just counted eighteen books that I’m reading on it right now. The last couple of years I like history and biography more and more. A good biography will have me visualizing a person, time and place pretty vividly. It’s like taking a trip in a time machine. Favourites include James Lee Burke, Stephen King, John Grisham, Flannery O’Conner, Michael Connelly, William Faulkner, Andrew Klavan, JRR Tolkien, David McCullough, and Shelby Foote. Five of those are from the American south, BTW.

Tell us about something you’ve read recently that moved you.

That’s probably a history of the American Dust Bowl in the 1930’s called ‘The Worst Hard Time’... absolutely unbelievable suffering. It changed my politics. People then had no social safety net whatsoever, and were left alone to sink or swim on their own. The other side of that coin is that the farmers in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle created the Dust Bowl by over-ploughing the prairie and expecting a couple decades of unusually rainy weather to continue indefinitely. They got greedy, especially with wheat prices going through the roof because of WWI. At any rate, for most of us that safety net is in place as a refuge of last resort.

What are you most thankful for in life?

Eternal life of course.

What makes you laugh?

People falling down... I’m laughing now just thinking of it.

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Dan Truitt has written four novels during the last ten years. His novel Spartan’s Daughter is available to read and download here.

http://turnerjunction.blogspot.al/