Oakland-based poet William Brewer says incorporating elements of his own life helped fuel his fiction.
“I want to say, first of all, that I am happy,” is the first thing the narrator of William Brewer’s debut novel, “The Red Arrow,” tells us. Then he settles into a train and begins traveling both forward and backward in time.
Brewer, a West Virginia native and award-winning poet, says he liked setting the character on the train because “it would imbue the book with a sense of motion and speed. I like stuff with a sense of propulsion – I’m a fan of punk rock.” That was like a splinter caught in the brain and just sat there. Then time went by and in real life I had an experience with psychedelic therapy and that set the ball rolling. From there I just wrote it one page at a time, which would show me the next thing to do. I rarely ever have a plan. I firmly believe that things tend to emerge. When you try cooking up a scheme it feels contrived so I never sat down and said I’m going to hit those topics.
This is someone writing who finds himself in a new, liberated mind and I wanted to honor that and capture the new sense of freedom that comes with that, so a feeling of flow on its own terms feels like a rewarding encounter.