Why do you write the genre that you write?
For many years—late teens through college and well beyond—I subscribed to The New Yorker and studied both in the classroom and out the short stories of Hemingway and O’Connor and Welty and Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver and just generally felt like I needed to write more big-L “Literary” stories. I won’t disavow the range or power of those stories, not hardly, but it was truly an epiphany to come back to the kinds of fiction I most enjoyed reading. As a kid, I devoured Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, and Three Investigators, and further on began to discover Agatha Christie and John D. MacDonald and Harry Kemelman. . . and even from those three names, you can see the range and power of the mystery genre too. I hope my writing draws on all those influences and more in various ways—the big-L literary too maybe, even as crime fiction feels most like home.

Tell us how you got into writing?
In fall of my third grade year, I told my English teacher I’d be writing a book over Christmas break and that she should look for it to be published sometime in the new year. That didn’t happen—it took a while longer (quite a while!) for my first book to come out, needless to say!—but the desire to write dates back that early for me, maybe earlier. I was always an avid reader, and it was always in my mind, “If I can write something that will give someone else that same feelings that I have now. . .” I still have early attempts at “novels,” the poems I submitted to elementary and middle school contests, the stories I published in my high school literary magazine, that whole development as a writer, step by step. Do my stories today give readers those same pleasures or thrills or insights or connections I felt even from a very young age? I can only hope so.

What’s next for you?
During the worst of the pandemic, I struggled to write anything at all. As 2020 came to a close and 2021 opened up toward the promise of better days, I found new impetus and opportunities to write. Some of those stories are currently searching for a home or else in revision and en route toward submission. And I’m hoping to return to plans for a novel—high-time I worked on another one.

What are you reading now?
I’ve recently finished Lauren Wilkinson’s exquisite American Spy, which I’m teaching next semester for a “Spy Novels” course at George Mason University—and speaking of Mason, I also just picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing that someone had left on the English Department’s “free books” table, hoping for some creative inspiration. I’m also rotating through two short story collections: W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (a novel in stories really, also for the spy novels course) and Philip MacDonald’s Something to Hide, which won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story in the early 1950s, back when that award went to a collection rather than an individual story. Great reads in all directions!

Where can we find you?
Check out my website at arttaylorwriter.com and connect with me on Facebook at ArtTaylorShortStories, on Twitter at @arttaylorwriter, and on Instagram at @arttaylorwriter.

Now to have some fun . . .

Vanilla or chocolate:
Chocolate, dark and even a little bitter. My son Dash and I
like our chocolate around 86% cacao.

Pizza or burgers:
Pizza definitely.

Broccoli or squash:
Ooh! I’m in for either, but if I had to pick I’d go with broccoli.

Breakfast, lunch, or dinner:
Dinner—and specifically Sunday dinner, which we try to make special.

Mountain or beach:
Beach—nothing more peaceful.

Introvert or Extrovert:
One of my students recently called herself an extroverted introvert—which
I realized seems to describe me perfectly.

And even more fun . . .

You are stranded on a deserted island. What are your three must-haves?
Totally cheating here: beachfront bar, hotel library, and the hotel to go with it. (It could still be
deserted. . . I can mix my own drinks and check myself into a fancy suite, no problem. . .)

My bio:
Art Taylor is the author of the story collection The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense and of the novel in stories On the Road with Del & Louise, winner of the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. He won the 2019 Edgar Award for Best Short Story for “English 398: Fiction Workshop,” originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and he has won three additional Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, four Macavity Awards, and three consecutive Derringer Awards for his short fiction. His work has also appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, and he edited Murder Under the Oaks: Bouchercon Anthology 2015, winner of the Anthony Award for Best Anthology or Collection, and California Schemin’: Bouchercon Anthology 2020. He is an associate professor of English at George Mason University, and he has contributed frequently to the Washington Post, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and Mystery Scene Magazine.