Novelist Howard Owen to Speak at University of Richmond
October 31, 2005
Novelist Howard Owen will speak on “Finding Time to Write,” Nov. 8, at the University of Richmond.
The speech will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Rosenbaum Room of the Jepson Alumni Center. Sponsored by the Friends of the Boatwright Memorial Library, it is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
Owen, deputy managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and before that sports editor, has written eight novels while working fulltime at the newspaper.
How was he able to do that? One way was to write for at least an hour every day. “A writer who knows what he or she is doing,” Owen says “can write a couple of pages of manuscript in an hour, which means you can do a first draft in four months.”
Owen began writing novels after he turned 40, publishing “Littlejohn” in 1992. In the critically acclaimed book, Littlejohn McCain, a North Carolina farmer, looks back on his life. The New York Times called it “a heartfelt celebration on the endurance of the human spirit.”
Compared to fellow Southern writers William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Owen has set all his books in either North Carolina or Virginia. “Littlejohn” was followed by “Fat Lightning,” “Answers to Lucky,” “The Measured Man,” “Harry and Ruth,” “Rail” and “Turn Signal.”
“Howard Owen is such a successful writer,” The Independent said, “producing in ‘Turn Signal’ an absorbing critique of suburban America that could as easily be described as a hallucinatory horror or a comic send up of the publishing business.”
His eighth book, “Rock of Ages,” which he calls “sort of a sequel to ‘Littlejohn,’” will come out next May.