Indie Spotlight: Dave Carty

Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!

Today, we are joined by Dave Carty, as he shares the how and why behind his April release 

Red Is The Fastest Color. 

Check it out! 

Red Is The Fastest Color – the Why and How

 

I wanted to write a book about friendship, and the important part it plays in the lives of people, especially those who are older, who aren’t in thrall to the hurricane swirl of emotions that is youth. What does it mean? How does it work? Is it worth the effort?

In Red Is The Fastest Color, a woman ailing with Parkinson’s disease calls her brother to ask for help. Her husband, Ben, despite his heroic efforts and devotion, is unable to manage the simultaneous demands of caring for his wife and the upkeep on their small Montana acreage. Jamison, the protagonist, agrees to move in with them, until…  But what happens then is never broached, for all the characters understand the progression of Parkinson’s disease, a disease that has robbed Monna, Ben’s wife, of her ability to paint, the driving passion in her life.

Balancing the complex emotional lives of three people, all of them no longer young, was no easy task. Ben and Jamison are wary of each other at first, and Ben gruffly rejects Jamison’s timid attempts at broaching a friendship. But when Monna’s health takes a turn for the worse, he finally reaches out to Jamison in desperation.

There are a couple of things I didn’t want to accomplish with this novel. I’ve spent all my adult life in the west, first in Colorado, and now, for nearly forty years, in Montana. I’ve grown up with, known, and (too often) drank with cowboys, farmers and ranchers. But too many books set in Montana and elsewhere in the west, by default, are considered “cowboy” books, when, in fact, the vast majority of people in the west don’t live on a ranch and don’t own a horse. I wanted to get away from the mythical west and explore the real west – the west filled with people who have emotional lives like everyone else, but whose lives are indelibly shaped by the magnificent land they live in.

The Greeks had at least three ways of defining love: eros, philos and agape. Only eros is defined as the romantic love so popular in modern novels and movies. But it was philos they considered the ideal.  In the way most of us would understand it, philos means brotherly love, relinquishing a part of yourself for  friendship. Red speaks to eros – the love between Ben and Monna, and philos, the brotherly love between Jamison and Ben. Woven between the two is this story.

 

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Dave Carty attended Colorado State University and the University of Colorado, where he majored in journalism. Throughout his early twenties he labored in a variety of mostly unskilled jobs. In his late twenties he sold his first article to a regional humor magazine, then went on to write for an array of national publications and, for the next 35 years, made his living almost exclusively by writing. To date he has published over 1000 articles in national magazines. He is the author of a collection of essays, Born Again At the Laundromat (upon which the Library Journal likened him the “Charles Kuralt of the West,”) and the novel Leaves On Frozen Ground, a haunting family drama set on the south shore of Lake Superior (Guernica Editions 2019). He lives in a small, two-story home he built for himself near Bozeman, Montana.

 

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About Red Is The Fastest Color: 

Jamison Everett, a shy and lonely man with few friends, is a retired high school English teacher. When his artist sister, Monna, who is suffering from Parkinson's Disease, calls and asks for his help, he reluctantly agrees to leave his apartment in Minneapolis and temporarily relocate to her remote Montana town. Perhaps, in caring for his sister, he will find the friendship he longs for. But Monna's fiercely independent husband, Ben, has a different game plan. Parkinson's has robbed Monna of her ability to paint, and if the doctors won't cure her, then by god he'll do it — by sheer force of will. Jamison, summoning his courage, offers to help, and an alliance is born. Yet neither man can know how much their nascent friendship will ask of them. Only Monna senses what is coming.

Grab a copy here.