Evan's tale "The Von Brunner Woods" will be featured in "It Calls From The Forest: Volume 1" available on April 15th.
Evan M. Elgin is a writer of both published and self-published fiction. His work has been previously featured in SERIAL magazine, while his debut novel Vive La Superior! is available on Amazon. He currently lives in a black void of “suburban weirdness” that makes up the Greater Chicago-area.
Have you always written, or was there a catalyst that prompted you to begin this journey?
In typical writer fashion, I’ve always been a big daydreamer as a kid, much to the woe of my teachers and parents. But there was nothing in class or growing up that took my attention more than telling stories, so I guess it was just a natural evolution for me to put those traits to pen and paper, and I’ve been writing ever since.
What is your favorite genre to read?
Horror is without a doubt my “bread and butter” genre. I love reading it as much as I like writing it. But I also enjoy coming-of-age teen novels, as well as “philosophy ’n’ wisdom” books.
Do you remember the first piece of writing shared publicly? What were people’s reactions, but more importantly how did you react getting it out there?
I do! When I was enrolled in a creative writing class in college, our final project was creating a micro-fiction zine that would be sold, published on-line, and previewed in a public reading on campus.
It was a pretty advanced fiction writing class, and a lot of my classmates (bless their hearts) were very, very “literary” about their writing. So a lot of the 500 word pieces turned out to have a lot of “substance and meaning”, while mine was simply about “a death row inmate being unremorseful just before he was put to the electric chair”.
Naturally, my classmates reacted to it with a “pretentious indifference”. The professor of the course found it “straight forward but fascinating”. And I passed the class with a B grade.
You gotta love those college fiction writing classes!
What is your workspace like? What kind of atmosphere do you need to write?
My workspace is pretty low-thrills: it’s just a desk and chair next to my bed. I have an old IPod Classic (the 160 GB one!) that I still use to set to fit the tone to the story I’m writing. Other than that, the only atmosphere I need is for it to be early in the morning or after sundown. I always have harder time writing during the day, for some reason.
Without giving too much away, tell us about the short story you have featured in “It calls to the Forest”. What inspired you?
For a short while in my twenties, I thought how cool it would be to have a day-job as a park ranger and work for the National Park Service, but the closest I’ve ever gotten was landing a seasonal job as a hiking guide and outdoor rec attendant for a YMCA in the Rocky Mountains.
I remember doing a lot of solo hikes on my days off, and if you know anything about Colorado is there’s some “interesting folks” in the mountains up-there. That occurred to me one day while trekking up a trail. I mentally began to prepare myself that I was probably going to run into two different things – wildlife, somebody I didn’t want to meet in the middle of nowhere, or both.
That’s where the inspiration came from.
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/evan_elgin
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Amazon Author’s Page: https://www.amazon.com/Evan-M-Elgin/e/B07Z47CFTF/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
“Vive La Superior!” : https://amzn.to/3b2k4vb
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