Q: Hello, Steven Verrier, and thank you for this interview. Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?
A: Well, I’ve been writing seriously since I was a teenager … first songs, and then I got hooked on prose while attending university in Canada. After completing undergraduate studies, I spent many years living and working overseas, particularly in Japan. Somewhere along the way I earned graduate degrees at Columbia and the University of Iowa, and I continued to write … getting some short plays published, along with articles and a nonfiction book titled Raising a Child to be Bilingual and Bicultural, based on my and my Japanese wife’s experience raising our children to be fluent in both parents’ native languages and cultures. More recently I’ve been concentrating on fiction, and my first novel, Tough Love, Tender Heart, was released by Saga Books earlier this year. A second novel, Plan B, will be published by Saga Books in 2009.
Q: Tell us about your book, Tough Love, Tender Heart.
A: It’s the story of Don Fisher, a middle-aged misfit—just about everything has gone wrong in his life—who finally meets the sort of woman he’s given up on ever meeting. This happens while he’s on vacation in Venezuela. The woman, Ana, is Colombian, working as a waitress in Caracas, and while the two don’t exactly have a storybook romance, a child is conceived during Don’s vacation. He doesn’t learn this until he’s back in the States, but from that point on his energy is directed toward marrying Ana and bringing her to live in the U.S. Little does he realize the obstacles U.S. Immigration is about to put in his path.
Q: You wrote the book Raising a Child to be Bilingual and Bicultural. Was the switch to novels a natural step? How did that come about?
A: Both books deal with situations I’ve been involved in or know well. I’d written fiction before, so the transition wasn’t difficult. For each book I simply chose the genre that I thought would be most effective in getting the subject matter across. As far as Tough Love, Tender Heart was concerned, it had to be a novel.
