Last week we had a review of Fred Venturini's debut novel, The Samaritan. This week Fred talks to us about his publishing experience, research and baseball.

Stymie: This is your debut novel. Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about your publishing experience working with Blank Slate Press? What has it been like now that your work is out there for readers?

Fred: Blank Slate was a great place for me to land early in my writing career. They’re focused, dedicated, and available. The advice is sound, the support is incredible, their input is creative and unique. New ideas are always flowing, and the best part is it’s not a half-assed, one-week push on your book and then it disappears into the night—it’s a sustained effort. When they’re reading new work, writers should get their pages in front of BSP—they won’t regret it.

As for having my work out there, I’m used to trickling short stories into market. Your friends, your family will usually pick up an issue, read the story, let you know what they think. What’s different about having a novel out with a promotional push is that you start connecting with a lot of new people that are outside your inner circle. When I get a random email, friend request, Twitter mention, etc., from people I don’t know personally, that’s something new for me.

Stymie: While the plot of THE SAMARITAN is definitely unique and interesting there is also a very strong voice in the novel. What is the relationship between Dale Sampson's voice and the plot of the novel? Did one come to you before the other, or was it always a package deal?

Fred: I developed my “voice” a lot more during my MFA experience. Doing so much writing, I started to delve into first person a lot more, discovering how the voice differed from my third person style. I noticed less simile, less filtration. It seemed more minimal and raw to me, and I enjoyed operating in first person as the MFA progressed. So my first person “voice” truly started to develop before the character did—it was an easy connection for me, once it came time to develop Dale in the first person. It’s not like he’s a Kenyan scuba diver or anything exotic—he’s a kid from a small town, so the voice match came naturally, making it easy to operate inside his head.

Stymie: I like you use of the word "raw" in describing Dale's voice. He often appears to be a tough character, though more vulnerable then he realizes and I noticed this especially in his friendships and interactions with his best friend, Mack. Did you set out to write a novel exploring friendship in this way?

The book is in many ways about friendship. In fact, only when my friend and former MFA classmate Deb Garwood made an insightful statement about the male friend dynamic (“Boys are friends forever, long after they should have outgrown each other”) did I discover the friendship thread that helped me get from a premise to a book that was inhabited by actual characters. Friendship is part of the book’s soul. I think all friendships like Mack and Dale have a façade of toughness that only occasionally breaks down, offering those realistic and tender moments. I really dosed up the tough talk and tried to find those moments of vulnerability. From the feedback I’ve gotten so far, people are responding to it, which is always fulfilling.

Stymie: THE SAMARITAN is deeply grounded in place and time, with many references to geography, states and pop culture influences, and of course reality TV has a very direct role in the story. What was your writing process like with regard to these elements? Did you do a lot of research, or was it drawn mainly from your own observations and life?

Fred: Most of the small town stuff, the baseball stuff—those are my own experiences. Research is always part of the writing process for me. It’s the way you unearth those little nuggets that add authority to your work. The big research projects for this one were reading surgical memoirs, getting inside a doctor’s head to help develop Doc Venhaus. Getting a gall bladder surgery to go wrong isn’t something I can draw up from my experiences—hence, a lot of reading to create one page or so. Same thing with reality TV—everyone has seen a program or two, knows what it is, but how is it created? More research. More reading. I sort of knew the shows were manipulated and packaged, but to find out how it was done took a stack of books. Same for the black organ trade, the organ donation system in the United States. Tons of research went into the book.

Stymie: And how much research went into writing a character with Dale's unique ability?

Quite a bit. Learning about the potential for human regeneration, about salamanders and other animals that can pull it off, about the black market for organs—all of it took a stack of books and a lot of notes. I’m thankful I live in the Google era—supporting articles were easy to find, notable books on the subject plopped right into my Amazon cart. This is the golden era of literary research, that’s for sure.

The healing part of his ability, I used my own extensive healing experience— healing from cuts and bone breaks and burns. The perpetual healing that Dale goes through, well, I share his pain. It’s where I truly relate to the character.

Stymie: Tell us a little about the baseball elements of THE SAMARITAN. Were you a high school baseball player? How important was it that they characters were baseball players, say, and not football players, for the arc and themes of the novel?

Football has always been my first love. This despite the fact my small high school didn’t even have a team. This didn’t stop me from giving it a shot in college—which helped me capture much of Dale’s awkwardness from the outset, his dread and fear that keeps him from joining the team.

I played high school baseball (not particularly well) and recall how that first practice, everything felt like it would be impossible. But I settled down and pretty soon felt slotted into the team dynamic fairly quickly. I mined all these little experiences for the novel—for one, baseball is one of the sports a small town school like that will be able to play and compete in. In baseball, one stud can win a high school game—he can pitch a shutout while going four for four at the plate. You don’t see that type of total dominance as specialization takes over at the higher levels of the game.

I could have chosen basketball, that’s always huge in small towns, but baseball had the right pastoral feel to it. It’s a game of grace and calm and sportsmanship—so bringing the battles to the ball diamond had the right rub for me. In hoops, it’s physical, there were always scraps at a competitive practice. A fight like the one Dale, Mack, Clint take part in wouldn’t seem like a big deal on a basketball court.

Stymie: Finally, what are you writing now?

I am chewing through some short story ideas, seeing what sticks while my next “long form” idea marinates a little bit. I read the Book of Revelation once—okay, more than once, it’s freaky and horrific—and got to thinking about a lot of the iconic items in that text. The Four Horsemen, seals, bowls of wrath, beasts—what if we had to literally confront this? What would you do if a beast with seven heads and ten horns came from the sea? I’m tinkering with bringing some of this into the real world, and the idea of a reluctant horseman really intrigues me, so that’s what I’m hashing out right now.

Fred Venturini grew up in Patoka, Illinois, where he survived being lit on fire by a bully, a neck-breaking car accident, and being chewed up by a pit bull. His fiction has appeared in places like River Styx, The Death Panel, Sick Things, Johnny America, and Necrotic Tissue, and he is a two-time Chuck Palahniuk anthology finalist. He lives in Southern Illinois with his beautiful wife, Krissy. The Samaritan is his first novel.