Warren Carrier is a respected fiction writer and an award-winning poet. He once taught at the famous Iowa School for Writers. He has published two titles for Mayhaven: Murder at the Strawberry Festival and An Honorable Spy. He lives in Galveston, Texas with his wife, Judy.

Warren, you are best known as a poet. How did you happen to write these mysteries?

I read mysteries for recreation, and decided to try my hand.

Writing must have been a part of your life since when, the moment you could string some sentences together?

In the third grade I fell in love with my teacher and wrote poems for her. She was very understanding. I think she liked having this little tyke writing poems to her.

Where did you grow up?

In Ohio and the northwest corner of Indiana.

Who influenced your life?

A high school teacher who thought I didn't appreciate poetry (we were reading Sir Walter Scott's "Lady of the Lake"). In an assigned essay I said the poem was boring. The teacher (about five feet tall and wearing a pince nez with a ribbon, while I towered over her at five eleven in my football player bulk) turned my paper over and wrote me an essay, telling me why she thought "Lady of the Lake" was a good poem. She concluded by saying, "some people just can't seem to appreciate poetry." I then showed her my own poems. She was dumbfounded. She was also dumbfounded when I wrote an extra chapter to A Tale of Two Cities as an alternative assignment to a term paper. She ended up giving me an A+ (the only one, she said, she had ever given.).

And when did you first publish?

Poems in the high school literary magazine (appropriately called "Growing Pains"). A few poems and translations while I was a college undergraduate in national literary journals, as well as the college poetry annual.

You were part of the famous Iowa Writing School. How did that happen?

One of my mentors in graduate school at Harvard recommended me to Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers Workshop. I didn't know he had, and was surprised to receive a letter out of the blue, offering me a job as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. Those were the days of the "good old boy" networks.

Had you already published?

By then I had published a few articles, poems and translations in national literary journals and anthologies. And I had a draft of my first novel in hand. It was published two years later by New Directions. And I had started and was the original editor of the Quarterly Review of Literature, which was to continue publication from Princeton for more than fifty years.

What did you take away from that experience?

That writers' workshops cannot provide you with the original talent to write, but the exchange of criticisms. The association with other writers encourages writing and exposes one to new techniques. And I not only taught, I learned from my faculty associates and from my students as well.

Murder at the Strawberry Festival was actually a sequel to an earlier book, wasn’t it?

Murder at the Strawberry Festival (my third novel and my second mystery, was a sequel to Death of a Chancellor, published originally in hardback by the John Day Company, in 1986, and later published in paper, in large type, by Simon and Schuster.

Weren’t both set in a small town in Wisconsin?

Yes, both were set in a small Wisconsin town, based on the small town in which I served as a university chancellor.

An Honorable Spy was a departure, a more global setting. What inspired that story?

I read spy novels and decided to try my hand at one. It was a different kind of fun.

How many books have you had published?

To date, eighteen books: eight novels (the most recent, Coming to Terms), six collections of poetry, a book of translations and three edited books. I have a collection of poetry about ready for a publisher.

What other kinds of writing have you done?

Literary criticism in various scholarly and literary journals. And I wrote reviews for a time for The San Diego Union, as well as other newspapers and for literary magazines.

We all saw the movie Misery. The fan wanted the writer to continue writing the characters she liked. Have you had any such experience, not necessarily with a fan, but have there been expectations that you would like to throw off?

Sometimes people, knowing that I write, want me to write about their experiences. I try to explain that I do "imaginative" writing.

You have had a full and successful career. Would you give a little advice to the unpublished writer?

Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Ask a friendly, straightforward, literate person to read your work and listen to that person's reaction. Take advice that's pertinent and useful. Ignore advice you think is not right.