In his 14th novel featuring retired police chief Kevin Kerney, Head Wounds (W. W. Norton & Company, 320 pages, 2020), novelist Michael McGarrity’s beloved protagonist plays a supporting role to the character’s son, detective Clayton Istee. But that doesn’t mean the 70-year-old Kerney doesn’t have wisdom to impart from his years on the force. McGarrity, 81, who introduced the character to the world with the publication of his first crime novel, Tularosa (W. W. Norton & Company, 304 pages, 1996) has some too, and not just from his own years in law enforcement.
He has something to say to aspiring writers of fiction. Some of it may be hard to hear, but it’s important if a writer wants to make a career out of setting their stories down in print.
McGarrity, a 2004 recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in literature, established the Hillerman-McGarrity Creative Writing Scholarship at the University of New Mexico, the N. Scott Momaday Creative Writing Scholarship at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the Richard Bradford Memorial Creative Writing Scholarship at the Santa Fe Community College. On Tuesday, Feb. 15, he gives an online lecture geared towards aspiring novelists: “How Writers Sabotage Themselves and What to Do About It.” The event is sponsored by the Santa Fe Community College Library.
McGarrity spoke with Pasatiempo about his own transition from various roles within the criminal justice system to full-time writer. With a slew of Kerney novels under his belt as well as a prequel trilogy, the national best-selling author can speak to the one thing that lends his novels authenticity — experience.
Pasatiempo: Long before you became a novelist, you spent more than 25 years in the criminal justice system. Undoubtedly, that experience helps you write police procedurals with some authority.
Michael McGarrity: I do have a background in clinical social work. My wife and I have been in Santa Fe almost 60 years now. When I came back from graduate school, out of state, we came to Santa Fe. We’d been living in Albuquerque before that. Before I came back to New Mexico, and after I got back, I got involved in working closely in and with the criminal justice system. That was my focus professionally as a social worker.
Pasa: You also worked for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. How did that come about?
M.M: I was recruited by an acquaintance. At the time, there was a rather forward-looking sheriff who wanted to make some improvements in the department and how it operated. I was brought in to help in the development of some critical services and modernization attempts.
Pasa: I understand that you were instrumental in establishing a sex crimes unit as part of that process.
M.M: Yes. It wasn’t a full-time unit. What we had to do was pick some fairly competent field officers, patrol officers who had an interest in that, and train them to sort of be able to function on the spot, simply because we were having an enormous uptick in some very high-profile sexual assault and domestic violence cases in the county. A rape crisis center had recently developed, so we were able to work with them. It was really a nice collaborative effort on the part of community agencies and the Sheriff’s Department.
Pasa: And such an important service.
M.M.: It still is.
Pasa: What prompted you to change the focus of your career and switch to writing?
M.M.: I was working for the New Mexico Corrections Department. After the infamous riot of 1980, I was brought on to head up adult mental health services for the department. My job was going to be to help them rebuild those services throughout the corrections system. It was a real burnout job. Then I went to work running a hospitalization program for chronically mentally ill patients. I decided, at that point — this was in the early ‘80s — that I wanted to take some time off and just see if I could get a story out of me. I’ve always been a reader, and I’ve always been good at writing. I’ve written professional articles and a lot of annual reports, things like that.
Pasa: And you were an English major at the University of New Mexico, so literature was something you knew well.
M.M: Actually, I had a double major in English and psychology. I was working as a writer for an educational publishing house in Albuquerque that had been started by one of my psych professors. He hired me as a junior editor. As I was finishing my junior year, he decided that he wanted to move the operation to Palo Alto, California. I went along for the ride. After I worked there for a while, I quit and finished my degree at San Jose State University.
Pasa: And the writing?
M.M.: I guess I had this itch to see whether I could tell a story, to see if I could actually put anything down that made any sense at all. It was like a grand experiment.
Pasa: Is that what became Tularosa?
M.M.: Oh, no. The first couple of manuscripts that I wrote were total trash. There was very little that was salvageable from either of them. But it was a learning experience. The storytelling thing is no easy task. It’s a monster of a task to be able to do it right. I found out that I could do it wrong better than just about anybody. But I decided that I could learn. I could fight my way through it. There were some things that I was good at. I was good at description. I was good at character development. I totally sucked at dialogue. I had all kinds of gaps in my narrative. But it was a hell of a lot of fun for me to try.
Pasa: When Tularosa was finally published, were you surprised by the success?
M.M: Oh, yeah. I was absolutely surprised. I’d sort of gotten the brass ring. I’d done something that I knew was remarkable because it was something that very few writers get to experience, to actually have a book published by a New York publishing firm. I thought, “That’s great. I just have to keep working and see if I can get another book done.” I did have a second manuscript. But the advance wasn’t that big. Then my publisher turned around and sold the paperback rights to Simon & Schuster for a six-figure deal. When I saw that I said, “Maybe I can make a go at this.” I quit my day job when Tularosa was published in 1996, and I haven’t looked back since.
Pasa: What was your day job at that time?
M.M.: I was working for the New Mexico Department of Health, basically doing a lot of what I would call inspector general work. I was working with a lot of facilities that were having problems with client neglect and abuse, some petty theft, some administrative issues, and procurement problems. I would sort of be sent out to many of the field operations to take a look and then report back to headquarters.
Pasa: I’m interested in how law enforcement influences how you write, not the narrative aspects so much, but the technical aspects.
M.M.: One of the things that was important at all the agencies where I worked was the actual gathering of knowledge about how things operate, how they work, and the intricacies of all of that. That helped to inform my stories. One of the things I want to talk about when I do this event is when beginning writers have an appreciation of a topic, or they have an insight into a certain situation or experience, they think they know it, but they really don’t. Their knowledge isn’t hard won. It isn’t a firm knowledge. It’s kind of a surface knowledge.
A lot of people who are pursuing a dream of wanting to write fiction have done a lot of reading, seen a lot of cop shows, watched the movies, and read the New York Times best-selling authors in the genre, and think, “O.K. I can figure this out. It’s a recipe. If I understand the recipe, then I can make my own version of a police procedural or a crime novel.” In reality, it’s not that simple.
Pasa: Ken Kesey used to say that you should never write what you know.
M.M.: Kesey was stoned most of his adult life. But he was able to take that experience and turn it into some really marvelous work. There are a few writers that can create something from their imagination that’s whole cloth. Ray Bradbury is a beautiful example of that. He wrote some absolutely incredible, brilliant science fiction about things that he had never experienced. Where he pulled that out of the cosmos I’ll never know. Maybe Ken Kesey isn’t all wrong. I, on the other hand, believe that really well-grounded experience is going to pay a lot of dividends to anybody who wants to write fiction.
Pasa: As you say, it has to be hard won.
M.M.: You’ve got to pay your dues. It doesn’t mean doing that as a writer. It means doing it as a human being. It means doing something that’s going to give you a broader perspective on the world. It can be idiosyncratic as hell. It can just be a weird point of view that you develop, in and of yourself, on your own. But it has to have substance to it. ◀
▼ Michael McGarrity: “How Writers Sabotage Themselves and What to Do About It”
▼ 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 15
▼ The event is free.
February 11, 2022 at 07:00PM
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/books/hard-won-author-michael-mcgarrity-writes-from-experience/article_56eb5a48-8aac-11ec-b3e0-53c1a0072f4e.html
Hard won: Author Michael McGarrity writes from experience - Santa Fe New Mexican
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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