Featured Interview With Author Gary M Jaron
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised by Reform Jewish parents and we lived in Levittown, Long Island, New York. I am a second-generation American whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine. I now live with my wife and our cat in Berkeley California.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My mom read me books as soon as I was born, the usual suspects, such as Dr. Suess, Winnie the Pooh, and Mary Poppins. As she realized that I would sit quietly and listen to anything she read aloud, she started to read me whatever she was interested in. I vaguely recall a history of native Americans and a history of nautical vessels. I recall reading and collecting Tom Swift Jr books at age eight and wanting to write books from then on. At age nine, I had a mystical experience that transformed me and left me certain that I would someday explain my philosophic insights in fiction and non-fiction writing.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite books would have to include Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Don Quixote, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the October Country, H. P. Lovecraft's Dreamland cycle, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe series, Maxwell Grant's The Shadow series, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and The Doctor and the Soul, Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy, and the writings of William James such as The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, and The Will to Believe.
My own writing fantasy writings are inspired by Bradbury, Lovecraft, The Shadow, and Vampire novels such as Anne Rice, Les Daniels, and even Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
My philosophic writings are inspired by Pirsig, Frankl, Berger, Gershom Scholem, and James.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My fantasy series comes out of my fascination with dreams and dreaming. As a young child, I scared myself in a waking dream when I imagined a pile of blankets on the closet shelf that vaguely resembles a sitting creature, I conjured it into a wolf, and then it turned and leaped off the shelf at me. I screamed! After being comforted by my parents that it was only a dream, I realized that dreams and reality were just separated by a thin crossable line. The more I read and studied about dreams and dreaming, the more fascinated and disappointed that no one seemed to bring this fully to the page.
Lovecraft's Dreamland held potential, but he and others who wrote in that realm failed to make it come to life and ground it in reality. To fully appreciate the power and wonder of living two intersecting lives. In 1985 I began to put on paper just these two worlds in a series of novels. So was born my Shattered Dreamers series, the first of which is Through The Gate of Dreams. The story begins with a challenge: What if it is true that we could truly live another life when we dream? What price would you pay to go through the gate of dreams into that other life? Four teens in San Francisco in the year 1979 are confronted with that choice. The book is presented as the edited Dream Journals and interviews of Lamont Corazon and Basha Edelman. It tells the tale of how Lamont discovers Dreamland and witnesses two young lovers, Jon and Lana, who get separated due to the gate between the worlds opening up. Jon found he had no choice, he was swept through the gate and therein lost his girlfriend Lana, and it seems his sanity. Lana would do anything to get Jon back, even believing the impossible. For Basha, a Jewess who is both a student of the Kabbalah and the new witchcraft tradition known as Reclaiming, the price is having to fight a being who claims to be a god and find a way to open the Gate of Dreams. For Lamont Corazon, a novice dreamer, going through the gate is a chance to discover his true destiny. He is the opener of the gate and the obstacle to be overcome. But is it really true to fulfill that destiny and reunited the two lovers, he has only two choices. Must he either relinquish his body or become a blood sacrifice? This begins my three-novel series.
I finished my first version of the first novel in 2000. I began to rework and rewrite it in 2010 and finished that version in 2019. The second novel, All My Days are Trances, was finished in 2022. I am working on the third book in the series, Believe that Love Will Never Fail.
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