For my first author interview of this year, I bring to
you Mike Jung, who wrote GEEKS, GIRLS, AND SECRET IDENTITIES (Arthur A. Levine).
Illustrations were by Mike Maihack. This MG book is a science-fiction and superhero
story with a superhero fan club, robots, and a middle school crush. The story
is told from the perspective of Vincent Wu, the president of the Official
Captain Stupendous Fan Club. Vincent and his friends live for sightings of their local
superhero. My page turning sped up when Vincent learns the identity of his
beloved superhero and when someone close to him is threatened by the evil
Professor Mayhem. The book had the right amount of heart and humor, as well as
action and suspense.
I recently interviewed Mike. He currently lives in
Oakland, CA and works as a library professional for a liberal arts college in
the East Bay.
What did you study at U.C. Irvine?
I was one of the more
dysfunctional students in the UCI Department of Fine Arts. My specialty was
ceramic sculpture - earthenware, to be more specific. I conducted one
incredibly brief experiment with throwing vessels on a wheel, but the other
99.9% of my time there was spent making handbuilt forms. People described my
work (such as it was) with terms like biomorphic abstraction, but I'm afraid I
was not the most scholarly art student in the world, so that was more credit
than I truly deserved. Despite my unhappiness during those years, however, I
did genuinely love working in clay, and I miss it - it's much easier to work in
clay when you have free rein in a university's ceramics lab than when you're
trying to make space in your kitchen.
GEEKS, GIRLS, AND SECRET IDENTITIES is
refreshingly funny. How do you weave humor into fiction writing?
I wouldn't say that I
deliberately try to weave humor into my writing, at least not anymore - it's
more that over time I've developed a voice that naturally skews toward
irreverence. I've always been more comfortable and effective with written communication
than verbal communication, but high school and college were the years when I
made more conscious efforts to write fiction - I took a bunch of fiction and
playwriting classes at UC Irvine, for example - and those were probably the
years when I was most deliberate about TRYING to write in a way that I thought
was funny. That very self-aware effort to be humorous became more organic and
internalized with practice, however, and eventually became an integrated part
of my writing sensibility.
What books/authors did you like to read as a
child?
I was (and remain) a
devoted fan of fantasy and science fiction, so authors like Tolkien, Anne
McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Madeleine L'Engle, T.H. White, Larry Niven, Arthur C.
Clarke, and Orson Scott Card were very important to me. I'm so sad and
horrified by what I've learned about Orson Scott Card's beliefs in recent years
- I couldn't disagree with him more strongly than I do - but ENDER'S GAME hit
me with the force of a hurricane. In middle school and high school, I became a
fanatical reader of Stephen King - this was back in what I consider his true
heyday, when I was able to procure books like CUJO, FIRESTARTER, and PET
SEMATARY at their original publication dates. I sometimes feel surprised by the
fact that I haven't tried to write a horror novel yet, but I suspect that day
will eventually arrive.
Thanks!
You’re
welcome, Mike!
