📚 A Bookish Chat with 'Rocked in Time' Charles Degelman | Author Interview | #AuthorInterview #BlogTour #Interview

Today we welcome Charles Degelman to The Writer's Life e-Magazine! Charles is the author of the novel, Rocked in Time. This interview is part of his Rocked in Time Blog Tour by Pump Up Your Book. Enjoy!

Charles Degelman is an award-winning author, performer, and producer living in Los Angeles. After graduating Harvard, Degelman left academia to become an antiwar activist, political theater artist, musician, communard, carpenter, hard-rock miner, and itinerant gypsy trucker. When the dust settled, he returned to his first love, writing.

A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the rural counterculture of the 1970s, collected a Bronze Medal from the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Awards and Gates of Eden, set during the anti-war movement of the 1960s, won an Independent Publishers book award.

Degelman’s screenplay Fifty-Second Street garnered an award from the Diane Thomas Competition, sponsored by UCLA/Dreamworks. A second screenplay, The Red Car, reached finalist status in Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest.

In addition, Degelman has written and produced documentary and educational films for TNT, Churchill Films, Pyramid Films, and Philips Interactive Media. He co-founded Indecent Exposure, a Los Angeles-based theater company dedicated to creating original, high-quality, socially relevant work for the stage. Degelman is on the faculty of California State University where he teaches writing in the Communication Studies Department.

His latest book is the historical fiction, Rocked in Time.

Website: https://www.charlesdegelman.org/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CDegelman

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charlesdegelman/

Welcome to The Writer's Life! Now that your book has been published, we’d love to find out more about the process. Can we begin by having you take us at the beginning? When did you come up with the idea to write your book?

Rocked in Time, volume three of a trio of historical novels that I call the Resistance Trilogy, grew out of a long period of frustration. As the decades have passed, I found that fewer and fewer people understood the depth, intensity, and effectiveness of the resistance movements that helped change the world for the better during the 1960s. I wanted to set the record straight.

Although I am a student of history, I wanted to tell the story of the resistance, not with historical documents, but with fiction, where I could more effectively revisit one of the most powerful axioms of the 1960s — that the personal and the political are inextricably intertwined.

To do that, I set out to write a sweeping historical overview. The first novel in the trilogy, Gates of Eden follows a handful of young rebels as they band together to create the most powerful antiwar movement in history.

From their scattered beginnings through the surge to resistance, Gates’ characters come from all classes and from all corners of the nation. They gather together to become activists in a serious but often joyful celebration of collective action, shared consciousness, sexual revolution, and the pursuit of social justice.

I set Volume Two of the Resistance Trilogy in America's rebellious, back-to-the-land counterculture of the 1970s. Here, the work becomes more self-referential. A Bowl Full of Nails draws on my life as a carpenter, communard, and counterculture gypsy to explore the reality that there was no real way to “drop out.” The long arm of the Vietnam war, the battles between the antiwar movement and its corporate foes extended across the war-weary nation, even to the rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains.

The third and final volume of the trilogy, Rocked in Time, slips behind the scenes of a blasphemous theater company hell-bent on toppling America’s Vietnam-era establishment with punch lines, pratfalls, and comic rebellion.

Along the way, our protagonist continues the exploration of the personal versus the political in the realm of radical artistic expression that was so rich and prevalent during the 1960s. Rocked in Time’s young protagonist pursues a love for the stage, his passion for resistance, and his naïve blunders with gender equality during second-wave feminism’s sexual revolution, all carried out amid the tear-gassed campuses and burning cities of a nation at war with itself.

Who is your publisher and how did you find them or did you self-publish?

I’m published by Harvard Square Editions (HSE) www.harvardsquareeditions.org/, an independent small press that grew out of a Harvard University-based writers and publishers discussion board. HSE’s mission is to publish fiction that transcends national boundaries, especially manuscripts that are eco-aware, and writing that is at once, beautiful, moving, profound, humorous, political, and literary. We were a perfect fit for each other.

How hard was it to write a book like this and do you have any tips that you could pass on which would make the journey easier for other writers?

Although I carried the intent and momentum of the first two volumes into this third and final Resistance Trilogy volume, Rocked in Time stands alone. It is the most autobiographical novel of the trio, drawing on my experience as a radical theater artist during the late 1960s and ‘70s.

It may seem at first like a short cut, or an easy task, to model a work of fiction on life experience. But adventurous as the radical theater scene was, I wanted to explore the depths of the inner workings, the interpersonal relationships, the struggle to create work that spoke to the harsh political realities of the time, but retained the bawdy humor, and political passion that drove the art — and broader realities of the time. To do this, I had to stand up close and personal to the creative process as I experienced it.

I immersed myself in the challenges of writing about my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters in the theater but ran into the classic dilemma writers often face: How do you write about people you know — and who know you — without damaging hearts, egos, and longtime friendships? Rocked in Time is a study in balancing on the ragged edge between fact and fiction, real and created characters. I have no ready advice on how to do this except to dig in and try your best to tell your truth. After all, you are the author, i.e., the authority. If you don’t tell your tale, who will?

What other books are you working on and when will they be published?

I have been immersed in Rocked in Time and the Resistance Trilogy for so long, I have not begun another large project. I do frequently write for an online magazine called Retrospect that features the recollections of Baby Boomers, many of whom share my experience as activists in the resistance movements of the 1960s and ‘70s.

What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

I think that many people would find the scope and scale, the energetic sprawl of the resistance movements surprising. We were everywhere and we were far more effective at changing the world than most people realize. In addition, many folks today take the Internet and social media for granted. In the 1960s all we had were telephones, typewriters, word of mouth, and mimeograph machines. Still, we got the news out to hundreds of millions of citizens around the world.

Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?

That political struggle is real and has real impact on all of our lives. That art can be a powerful weapon in the battle for social justice. And most important — that women hold up half the sky and more than half the workings of the world. Once again, men need to recognize the power of women and appreciate feminism’s basic truth, beauty, and power.

Thank you again for this interview! Do you have any final words?

Thanks for the opportunity to present this view of Rocked in Time and the Resistance Trilogy. I hope some of your readers will take an interest the tales I tell. Most important, I hope that writers will find inspiration to explore the perpetual, yet always changing dance that comes when artists set out to describe their political awareness and use their craft and imagination to write on topics and in ways that will support the ongoing fight for social justice and the life of our planet.

Rocked in Time (Volume Three in the Resistance Trilogy) slips behind the scenes of a blasphemous theater company hell-bent on toppling America’s Vietnam-era establishment with punch lines, pratfalls, and comic rebellion. Along the way, our protagonist pursues a love for the stage, a passion for resistance, and the intimate politics of sexual revolution amid the tear-gassed campuses and burning cities of a nation at war with itself.

Release Date: October 18, 2022

Publisher: Harvard Square Editions

Soft Cover: 978-1941861882; 408 pages; $22.95

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AhO7NW