Photo credit: Elizabeth Gorman
Please welcome Robert Greer, author of Spoon, as he discusses his vision for the novel.
My novel Spoon is as much a coming-of-age novel about a nineteen-year-old rancher’s son, TJ Darley, as it is about a mysterious loner’s clairvoyance and the changing landscape of the ranching community in the modern West. In the novel, loner Arcus Witherspoon, aka Spoon, befriends a Montana ranching family down on their luck. He helps the Darleys struggle against an attempt by a coal company to take over their land and along the way also guides their son toward manhood. Although the novel is best defined as a literary piece, I set Spoon in motion with an element of suspense. Perhaps, I suspect, because my skills as a writer hover around that sensibility. In a sense, I hoped to combine two things I have been trying to master for years into a single form: a novel of suspense and a literary novel. In Spoon, I paint a picture of a loner. A half-Indian, half-black cowboy adrift in the West, searching for his family roots. Spoon is a man who, it turns out, has the tenacity and wisdom to help others during his journey. The novel is not a Western in the genre sense of the word, but it is certainly a novel of the West and, as such, I have tried to make the story take in the broad western panorama that I suspect many people have in their minds when they think of the West. I imagine that there is a little bit of Arcus Witherspoon in me since I own a working cattle ranch in Wyoming and I admit up front that there is also some plot-related bias toward a rancher’s perspective in the book. In the end, however, as with all novels, the book is about people and characters, and they are ultimately the ones who navigate readers down any storytelling road.
Thank you, Robert, for taking the time to stop by. For more information about Greer and his other pieces of fiction, please visit his Web site.
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