I got to speak with with the ever gracious Ben Steelman of the Wilmington Star News last week about The Night of the Comet. Here’s what we talked about.
Bookmarks – Celestial Focus, but Heart on Ground
By Ben Steelman
Published: Saturday, July 27, 2013 at 12:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 26, 2013 at 1:39 p.m.
George Bishop wasn’t all that much into the space program when he was a boy. “Oh, I built models of the Apollo capsule,” he recalled in a phone interview from his home in New Orleans.
Still, Bishop remembers peeking through a telescope in middle school, in his tiny Louisiana hometown, scanning the skies for Comet Kohoutek back in 1973.
“It was all in the pop culture at the time – it was hard to miss,” Bishop said. “It was kind of the last gasp of the space race.”
Bishop would go on to a career teaching English in a string of exotic countries, from Indonesia to Azerbaijan. In 2000, he earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Now, 40 years after the comet’s sighting, he’s made Kohoutek a character in his second novel, “Night of the Comet,” to be released Tuesday by Ballantine Books.
“It’s not really a book about astronomy,” he said. “It’s more about relationships, about fathers and sons and husbands and wives.”
Bishop said he didn’t set out to write a Kohoutek book. Instead, he started out with two images he couldn’t get out of his head: A broken telescope, sitting in a corner, and a man in a raincoat, jumping off a roof.
“I wanted to fit those things together,” he said.
Writing this novel was harder than his first, he said, because he wanted to exceed his first effort, “Letter to My Daughter,” which debuted in 2010 to mixed reviews but strong sales.
“I felt like my whole career was hanging on every word I wrote,” he added.
“Night of the Comet” ended up taking a year longer to finish than he’d hoped.
Bishop said he’s having less trouble with his next novel, which is also set in Louisiana and falls during the U.S. Bicentennial of 1976.
Now writing full-time, Bishop isn’t teaching regularly, although he did spend a month in Turkey last year under the auspices of the U.S. State Department.
And he fully credits UNCW for much of his success.
“I had been writing for years, scraps of stories from years overseas,” he said. “But no one was reading them. When I got to Wilmington, for the first time, I was finally in a community of readers and writers, getting feedback and a sharp critical eye. It was like heaven.”
Bishop will be returning to Wilmington in the fall, for a reading at Pomegranate Books.