 Welcome to In the Studio. I'm your host today, Alex Silvasatter. And our guest is Scott Evans, who is a local author and the editor of the Blue Moon literary and art review. Hello Scott, how are you doing doing fine Alex. How are you. Excellent. So, Scott attended UC Davis, the master's program, and got his English degree there. You've also been a teacher at the University of the Pacific, and you also taught at LSU, correct. And then I believe you're also teaching some classes at UC Davis still. I have taught at UC Davis. I taught ESL at Davis and then I also taught summer courses at the King Hall Law School outreach program for three years. Okay, so how about you tell us how, how did you get started as a writer is this something that you've always wanted to do, or did you come to it by another path because you've written novels as well as being the editor of the moon. Well, actually I started writing when I was about 10 years old because I found a typewriter in my parents closet and pulled it out and started typing up a story about Dracula. I was a big fan of horror movies. So, but I didn't really write seriously until probably college. And then I did go to UC Davis grad school in creative writing. So I did a lot of writing then, but then I started teaching. And my first full time teaching job was at Louisiana State University in baton Rouge, Louisiana. And then my wife and I moved back to California and I taught part time at Sierra College and a couple other places before taking a full time teaching job at the University of the Pacific. And that's where I taught for 32 years until I retired about a year and a half ago. When I did the first novel. Yeah, the first novel. Project flaws. I started writing this actually after my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I had also been moonlighting at Delta college and because of budget cuts those classes were taken away so I found myself with a lot of free time. And since there was so much in my life that was outside my control, sitting down to write a novel gave me a sense of control because you can control what your characters do you can control the plot. So it was a very therapeutic exercise and in fact my first book is dedicated to my wife who I'm happy to say knock on wood is cancer free. Yeah, I just fell in love with writing it took me about a year to write that book, and you know, the writing the first draft is the fun part. Editing and revising several times becomes laborious and a little tedious but you've got to do it. And I started working on my second book, which is titled first folio, and that took about five years of research because it examines the question of who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare. So, five years of research, lots of trips to the Shakespeare authorship conference up in Portland, Oregon. A number of books, investigating that so that was a, I didn't realize what I was getting myself into and I started the research on that. All of my books my literary mystery series have a some kind of a literary link. The third book is titled Sylvia secret, and it's about Sylvia Plath. And the most recent book that I've written is called the Paris papers, and even newer than the one I saw the Caribbean prisoner. Yeah. Now the Paris papers is set in Paris obviously. And it's about Hemingway's first lost book manuscript if you read the Paris wife about Hadley Richardson. And we all know that when Hemingway was up in Switzerland, he sent a telegram to his wife to bring his book manuscript up to Switzerland from Paris, because he had met an editor editor up there, who was interested. Unfortunately, she put not only the whole book manuscript but also the carbon copies of that manuscript in a briefcase, and then got on the train, but she got off the train briefly to buy some cigarettes and water. And when she came back the briefcase had been stolen. And so, yeah. In my opinion that was the beginning of the end of Hemingway's first marriage. So, so the Paris papers explores that. All right. So, you're the editor of the blue moon literary and arts review. And what was the impetus for creating this publication. And about let's see, I guess, 14 years ago now. I was teaching a creative writing class at the Davis Art Center. The Davis Art Center used to be in a two story house near downtown but then as you probably know, they build a facility in Davis Park on the corner of covel and Oh, God, that's across street. And it's a beautiful facility so I was teaching a class. And I believe it was in May. And after about the third session was a weekly class. I realized that there were a bunch of really talented writers in this class. And I decided while walking home from the class, I live about four blocks away as walking through the park. I decided that I wanted to publish their writing because it was so good. And it happened to be the night of the second full moon in May. And that's where the title blue moon came from. And this is a copy of the very first one, which was printed up at Kinko's. Very amateurish the first one, but I was able to showcase a number of the authors. Some of whom went on to publish quite quite successfully. So, and I still run the writer's critique group but I don't make them pay for it anymore we do it out of my house we meet on Thursday night from 630 to 930. And I've had usually, you know, we shut down because of the pandemic but now that everybody in the group has been has gotten their second vaccine we're going to start up again in April. So, we meet for about three hours, beat our work out loud and share copies and then go on to publish my. A lot of the writers have gone on to publish. Yeah, those are covers of the blue moon literary and art review. Including the most recent issue which is number 12 correct. Well actually no, the most recent issue is number 17. Oh, I've had trouble with the website getting the new issues up on the website so here's the newest issue. Unfortunately, I got to get my web person to update the website. And how, how has the review evolved from when you first started it. Has it even have you found that it's changed or I mean you've been doing it for a while. Yeah. Well, for about 13 years. I started it was pretty much I was just publishing the writers who were taking my class, my workshop. But as we grew and expanded and got noticed by other publications we started getting submissions from all over the state and then from all over the country and now we get submissions from all over the world. Especially because we now publish through Kindle direct publishing the old version of create space so the magazine is available on Amazon. And so it gets a lot of notice we back we just had a submission from Hong Kong. We published writers from Germany and Italy. And that's really fun. But, you know, they get to complimentary copies as their payment. And sometimes sending those to places like Europe can be very expensive. That's one of the downside of being international. You're doing it as a digital and a physical publication. Do you think there's an importance to still having physical, you know, because everyone's digital digital, but the importance of having a physical publication. I do. You know, when I first got a Kindle, I started reading a lot of books on my Kindle. And I got really tired of it. And so now when I read for pleasure, I like to read a book that I can hold in my hand. And so I think there are still a lot of us old dinosaurs who prefer physical books to digital. I still occasionally, you know, read stuff on electronic device but when I'm reading for pleasure I want to hold a physical book. I also like to subscribe to magazines, so I like to hold magazines too. I'm the same way I still read books all the time. So, I noticed one of the, one of the things that you solicit for our excerpts from novels that are in progress. And I was wondering if maybe you could tell us about why you feel it's important for an author to, to get that published before they finished everything how does that help the author develop. You know, maybe developing some publicity and so forth. Right. So one of my missions, you know, I've taught writing for years and years at the college level, but I've also been mentoring other writers for years and I find it really, really rewarding. Not just because they put me in their acknowledgments page, although I do appreciate that. But it's just really rewarding to help other writers promote their work. And so when a novel is a novel excerpt is accepted by a literary review like the blue moon. It really helps boost the ego of a struggling writer, and more than once we've published an excerpt from an author's very first novel, and I know from experience that something like that can really encourage a person to continue with their work. That's excellent. So, as a successful novelist yourself. What advice would you have to young people that are young writers that are out there listening now. Are there particular things they should focus on. As far as skills are, I mean, people can write any genre but Well, I have a few pieces of advice actually the first piece of advice is don't give up just keep writing, even if you feel like what you've written one day is just really bad. Don't give up keep working on it. The second piece of advice is to try to set a schedule of a time when you can write at least for an hour a day. And during that writing time, just write don't do anything else turn off your phone. And even if what you've written doesn't seem very good but if you push yourself to write at least for an hour sometimes you'll, you'll find a rhythm and you'll keep writing there been writing days when I started at eight o'clock in the morning, and I didn't end until two o'clock in the afternoon, maybe just to take a brief break for a quick bite of lunch, because I found rhythm and momentum to just keep going. Other days, my writing schedule is usually to write about three hours in the morning. But, you know, sometimes you, you do your three hours or maybe an hour. And that's all you can do that day. I always try to end with a sentence where I know what the next sentence is going to be so that when I come back to it. I can pick up where I left off. In fact, if I, if I finish a chapter, I'll often start the next chapter with just a few lines just to, you know, make sure that I can pick up the pace. The third piece of advice I would give is to find a writing group, a writer's critique group so that you can share your work with others and get feedback. We have a different group here in Davis. We meet on Thursday nights from 630 to 930. And if anybody's interested in joining that group, as long as they've received both COVID shots, they'll be free to attend in person. And they can contact me for interested. I think one last sort of follow up along those lines is how important is it for a very young writer, you know, to maintain their own voice, when they're going to be getting a lot of advice from teachers and from other people critiquing them and stuff like how do they decide Well, maybe I do need to change something about my technique or style versus holding on to what makes their voice unique. That's a challenging issue for any writer. And I think the more experience you gain, the more you find your own voice I know that my writing style in my first novel tragic flaws has has really evolved so that my my writing more recently has become, I think, better. So you find your voice by exercising your skill your craft of writing, but also getting feedback. And I, you know, I write my literary novels in the third person limited omniscient third person, but I also write memoirs in the coming of age stories in the first person and it's really interesting to change person and see how that affects your style. Okay. Well, I think that's almost it for today as far as time do you have anything else you'd like to share with the viewers about the blue moon literary and arts review or art review. Well, just if you are a writer and you have some short stories or poems or artwork and you'd like to submit it, go to the website which is listed there and feel free to submit. You can also just submit it directly to me at my web at my email address which is Evans 327 at Comcast.net. Okay. And that's all thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today and share your advice for the writers out there and tell us about the blue moon literary and art review. That's it. Sure happy to be here. Thank you.