Interviews with CG FEWSTON

“When I’m writing, I’m connected to something greater than myself and Time becomes somewhat different. That’s when I know I’m doing what I was meant to do.”

How do you write?

Longhand, with a black uni-ball pen and a Moleskine the size of his palm. The story goes in the front. Notes and research go in the back. He reads every line aloud, corrects, and reads again until the fictive dream does not stumble. Only after the notebooks are full does the typing begin. Before a book leaves the desk, he has read it aloud hundreds of times.

Full-time or part-time?

A full-time novelist, and first a stay-at-home father. Up at 4:30 to write before his son wakes. School run, then the desk by about 8:30. If one novel stalls, he switches to the other. Afternoons and evenings belong to family.

What was most useful in learning to write for publication?

John Gardner — On Moral Fiction, The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist — and the discipline of keeping the fictive dream intact. The destructive habit, he says, is caring too much about the noise of the moment, or about what critics think. Do the work. Let the fiction speak.

Read the Bibliotica interview

“For better or worse, Texans have a direct way of telling it like it is.”

How has being a Texan influenced the writing?

Directness. Unflinching, but also kind, patient, and considering — with the story and with the people in it. Strangers abroad ask where he is from. The answer has a sound.

Where did the love of books come from?

Brownwood, Texas, before the internet was a room in the house. His grandmother read bedtime stories of Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, and Helen Keller, and a tale of a white crane at the lake. Books were the entertainment.

Why this genre?

He is not bound to one. Historical fiction is the home ground, because the research is the pleasure and the difficulty. Conquergood is science fiction because the story demanded 2183 — written, he says, as if it were future history.

Read the StoreyBook interview

An orphan tale in the line of David Copperfield, set a hundred and sixty years on, under a one-world order that calls itself peace.

What set the story up?

Jerome Conquergood and his twin, Vincent, echo Dickens: an orphan and an outcast who rises, and who is looking for family. The Korporation extends something Orwell saw. The turn in the book came in 2008, after a move from South Korea to Ho Chi Minh City, and a first month spent watching a pride in a system most Americans had only been taught to fear.

What drives Jerome?

Less a plan than the character himself. The ideal underneath is the one in the headline: writing as a way of being connected to the universe, even when the path is opposed. Jerome’s search for his brother becomes a search he did not schedule.

What the book is asking

Artificial intelligence and the soul. What counts as real. Whether a person can be improved into immortality. History, family, love as a form of consciousness, and the cost of obedience to a corporate peace.

Asked in 2023 what was next, he named two books in progress: A Time to Remember in Moscow, and a historical novel set in Texas in 1901. That Texas novel is completed. It will be published as Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints on 25 December 2026.

Read the Literary Titan interview

“Love ultimately transcends and conquers times, places, wrongs, and it is love that binds a variety of cultures, traditions, and peoples as one.”

What inspired the book?

A line he gives to Nina: a wende must come. Die Gedanken sind frei. Thoughts are free. They cannot expect people to live like this forever. The novel is also about Vergangenheitsbewältigung — overcoming the past — and about memory as a cultural question, not only a private one.

Why this era, and why these cities?

Tehran, East Berlin, and Moscow in the 1970s live now in memory, in art, and in archives. East Berlin as it was no longer exists. The hope for the trilogy is not a lesson in borders. It is that love outlasts them.

What he hopes is distinct

Not a pose of expertise. A decade and more of living in Communist and Socialist countries, carried into the books as first-person ground — and into the life of a father and a novelist.

Read the BookTrib interview

“Characters. Absolutely characters. Characters create and drive plot.”

The day

Nine in the morning, a pen, a 9 × 14 cm Moleskine. One scene, read aloud, until the dream does not break — four or five hours, sometimes longer. Typing waits until chapters exist. Monday to Friday, nine to two. Afternoons are for reading, research, and the rest of a writing life. Night notes go in the back of the notebook for the next morning.

How a finished book is judged

Print it. Leave it for weeks, sometimes months. Then read it aloud as a stranger, pen in hand. Repeat until the pen only makes checkmarks — for the passages that move, for the surprises, for the work a reader should never have to notice.

A trap for new writers

Writing what the market is asking for this year. A novel takes two or three years. The market will have moved. Write the subject you can love at a mad pitch for that long. Travel, even if travel is the park two blocks away. And write for the joy of it.

On influence he names Proust, Campbell, García Márquez, Fowles, Irving, Rushdie, Gardner, McCarthy, Murakami, and Coelho — and, from a literature class at Howard Payne in 2000, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Read the BookView interview