SALT LAKE CITY, UT, May 07, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Thomas Russell Wingate with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Wingate has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
IMAGINARY INTERVIEW
Q: Why are we doing this interview?
A: I have much to say. This is the sweetest and shortest way I can get it said.
Q: What led you to take up writing?
A: I am fond of saying that I have been a writer since my prenatal experiences. Chronic bronchitis and asthma kept me bedridden in boyhood. I drove myself to become an increasingly astute spectator.
Q: Did you have support from any quarter?
A: The United States Army has very few millionaire sergeants. My father was not one of them. My mother valued reading and made sure I had the classes available. She also enjoyed traveling. I owe the Army a lot for taking me out of upstate New York and sending me to Europe and California. My first Christmas in San Francisco, age nine, 70 degrees, not a cloud in the sky. I ended up spending eighteen years in California. All my life, I have sought and found role models in historical and fictional personae, not real persons close at hand.
Q: How have you structured your work?
A: When poetry took me over, I decided to throw in as much place as possible. A.E. Housman, Shropshire … Thomas Hardy, Wessex … myself, California, the only state named from a work of fiction. And I have always loved the night sky and maps and globes. In the long run, it will be impossible for anyone educated to look at the night sky and not think of my works. When I became a novelist, my central character, a taxi driver (as was I), correctly describes the stars on a certain hour of a certain night as seen looking eastward from the Golden Gate Bridge. I do my homework. I am meticulous.
Q: How did you become a novelist?
A: It has long been my professional opinion that, just as no one excels at both the violin and the trombone, no one can be a first-rate poet and a first-rate novelist. Kipling was a great poet but not much of a novelist. Hardy's novels are far better than his poems. No one returns to Poe's novels. Victor Hugo has admirers who disdain his novels and others who disdain his poems. I will leave you in the dark as to where I stand.
When we met, my second wife, known now as Anne Wingate, was a novelist eager for an academic career. She gained her doctorate, but her health collapsed. She was under contract to publishers. Every writer feels, or has felt, the pinch. I found myself providing characters and plots to her novels. It was easier than I supposed.
Q: Marquis wants to know your two most recent achievements.
A: Both are what writers call "works in progress." The first, available instantly, is our website, www.Wingate-Firms.com. Anyone aspiring to be a writer will be grateful for this resource. It has taken years to compose. It was as intricate as a novel.
The second is eight connected novels collectively called The Laughing Emperor. (I invented a Chinese idiom roughly meaning Untellable Fate.) It is an alternate history from 1973 to 2023. Volumes I and II are complete; III, IV, V and VII are in progress, to be followed by VI and VIII.
My characters move from San Francisco to China. (I have lost count of the books I own about China.) If you were a twelve-year-old Chinese-American son of a Presbyterian minister, and you made up your mind to become emperor of China, how would you go about it?
My French is playful and inventive. My primary narrator is Victor Hugo Forth (who goes forth). His Chinese-American wife bears three sons, one named from Stevenson's last novel, followed by twins, Edgar and Allan.
Stevenson, Poe, Swift, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Michener, Orwell, Herodotus, Gibbon, Cervantes, Rabelais, Verne – satire, parody, murder mystery, and overarching history mingle. The reader will be doing much laughing and wanting more. Yet the prose is "clean,"; despite all the murders, you would let your fifteen-year-old daughter read it if she wanted to.
I am deliberately following Stevenson, a Scot well remembered in San Francisco. Just as the central character in Hunchback is the cathedral, so my novels display as much of the Golden State as they can: YOU ARE THERE. Every continent, even Antarctica, comes plausibly forward.
Like Tristram Shandy, like Catch-22, like Norte-Dame de Paris, like Dune, like Ulysses, The Laughing Emperor creates its own category.
My discursive octology—vivid characters in tightening situations—fits together. The last page is a tear-jerker.
Thomas Russell Wingate
Salt Lake City
March 2018
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Thomas Russell Wingate has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis® now publishes many Who's Who titles, including Who's Who in America®, Who's Who in the World®, Who's Who in American Law®, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare®, Who's Who in Science and Engineering®, and Who's Who in Asia®. Marquis® publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
# # #