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WORK TITLE: Over Our Heads Under Our Feet
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/29/1953
WEBSITE: https://dwightholing.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 87891738
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n87891738
HEADING: Holing, Dwight
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010 __ |a n 87891738
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca01967288
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |d GVaS |d IEN
053 _0 |a PS3608.O48433
100 1_ |a Holing, Dwight
371 __ |m info@dwightholing.com |v www.dwightholing.com, contact (info@dwightholing.com) |u www.dwightholing.com
372 __ |a Literature |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a His California wild lands, c1988: |b CIP t.p. (Dwight Holing)
670 __ |a The far West, 1996: |b CIP t.p. (Dwight Holing) data sheet (b. 9/29/53)
670 __ |a California works, 2013: |b p. 4 (lives and writes in California)
953 __ |a bd65 |b jb11
PERSONAL
Born September 29, 1953; married; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Has worked in a body shop and as a salmon processor.
AWARDS:Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to newspapers and magazines, and short stories to journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Dwight Holing is an author of short fiction and detective novels, and has written or edited several nonfiction books on nature travel and conservation. “I’ve always made my living as a writer, if you don’t count the stints working in a body and fender shop and cutting and gutting salmon in Alaska,” he related in an essay on the Story Prize website. “Nonfiction books, newspaper articles, magazine features, special reports, you name it, I’ve written it. Whatever could pay the rent, the trips to distant lands, then the mortgage, the sitters, the tuitions. Well, you get the picture.” Of writing fiction and nonfiction, he told Deborah Kalb on her Deborah Kalb Books site: “I like both and still do both. Nonfiction certainly works its way into both my short and long fiction. The “Jack McCoul” series is set in San Francisco and I love to share with readers its colorful history and quirky nature. Characters, conflicts, and cool stuff inhabit the environmental issues, life sciences, and outdoor adventures I’ve written about, and so I let the natural world be a source and inspiration for stories.”
Bad Karma
The eponymous protagonist of the “Jack McCoul” series is a con man who also investigates murders. Holing introduced Jack in A Boatload, and he followed it with Bad Karma. This novel finds Jack trying to make a living that does not involve confidence schemes; he is developing a smartphone application. He cannot escape his past altogether, however. A former criminal associate, Bobby, contacts him with a plan to steal a priceless gold Buddha statue. Dexter Cotswold, the owner of the statue, is soon murdered, and the prime suspect is Cotswold’s wife, Laura, who happens to be the best friend of Jack’s wife, Katie. Meanwhile, Bobby vanishes. Jack uses his underworld skills–among other things, he is adept at breaking into homes–in his quest to find the real killer. He also joins forces with a fellow con artist, Hank, and a computer hacker. As Jack investigates, there are complications including a kidnapping and another murder, and he and Katie are threatened by various mysterious forces, possibly including the shady investors who have been financing his app.
Bad Karma is “an engrossing novel” with “a likable, levelheaded protagonist,” according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The critic found Katie “a fine character” as well–Jack is the rare happily married private eye–but wished she had played a bigger role in the story. Nonetheless, the critic praised the novel as “a proficient detective story that keeps the plot turning,” further noting that the tale “is loaded with dishy one-liners.” It “should earn the series a bevy of new fans,” the commentator concluded.
Over Our Heads Under Our Feet
This collection of ten short stories depicts people dealing with a variety of challenges and, often, making life-changing decisions. In the title story, a man with early-onset dementia seeks escape by traveling to Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain, where he ponders his past and his future. “Between Wind and Water” sees an engineer on a job in Hawaii, where he questions his workaholic ways amid the islanders’ relaxed way of life. In “Yellow Dog” a woman leaves a relationship to start afresh in Mexico. “Thief in the Night” examines the intensely competitive nature of Silicon Valley. “The Test” looks at the process of adopting children from China.
The overarching message of Over Our Heads Under Our Feet is “to make decisions now that will bring contentment when looked back on,” related a Kirkus Reviews commentator. The critic praised “Holing’s thoughtful, melancholic writing,” saying it should resonate with “readers of a particular age” who have regretted certain choices. The reviewer summed up the collection as “a poignant and altogether agreeable sequence of tales.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2015, review of Bad Karma; February 15, 2018, review of Over Our Heads Under Our Feet.
ONLINE
Deborah Kalb Books, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (January 14, 2017), Deborah Kalb, interview with Dwight Holing.
Dwight Holing website, https://dwightholing.com (July 11, 2018).
Story Prize website, http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/ (December 20, 2012), “Dwight Holing Keeps It Real.”
Dwight Holing lives and writes in California. His genre-spanning work includes novels, short fiction, and nonfiction. His mystery and suspense thriller series include The Nick Drake Novels and The Jack McCoul Capers. The stories in his collections of literary short fiction have won awards, including the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. He has written and edited numerous nonfiction books on nature travel and conservation. He is married to a kick-ass environmental advocate; they have a daughter and son, and a dog who’d rather swim than walk.
About the Author
Dwight Holing lives and writes in California. His genre-spanning work ranges from mysteries to short fiction to nonfiction. It includes The Jack McCoul Capers, a mystery series set in San Francisco and starring a con artist who solves murders. The stories in his collections of literary short fiction have won awards, including the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. He has written and edited numerous nonfiction books on nature travel and conservation. He's married to a kick-ass environmental advocate; they have a daughter and son, and a dog who'd rather swim than walk.
Learn: dwightholing.com
Follow: @DwightHoling
Like: facebook.com/dwight.holing
Quoted in Sidelights: “I like both and still do both. Nonfiction certainly works its way into both my short and long fiction. The Jack McCoul series is set in San Francisco and I love to share with readers its colorful history and quirky nature. Characters, conflicts, and cool stuff inhabit the environmental issues, life sciences, and outdoor adventures I’ve written about, and so I let the natural world be a source and inspiration for stories.”
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
Check back often for new Q&As, and for daily historical factoids about books. On Facebook at www.facebook.com/deborahkalbbooks. Follow me on Twitter @deborahkalb.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Q&A with Dwight Holing
Dwight Holing is the author of the new mystery novel Baby Blue, the third in his Jack McCoul series. His other books include Bad Karma and A Boatload. He lives in California.
Q: How did you come up with your character Jack McCoul, and did you know you'd be writing a series from the beginning?
A: I’d been writing short fiction for literary journals and wanted to mix it up as I believe crossing genres keeps a writer fresh. Since crime fiction has always occupied a prominent section of my own library, I gave it a go.
The result was a humorous story about a quick, hip, and shoot-from-the-lip con artist trying to go straight who is a composite of various real life people I’ve known. It was published in Spinetingler Magazine.
Halfway through writing it, I realized Jack McCoul was just too fun to let go. Or at least he conned me into believing he could play on a larger stage.
Q: How do you think the character has changed since the first book?
A: One of the unwritten rules of the traditional private eye genre I broke was making Jack McCoul happily married. Not only does this imbue the murder mystery series with the give and take between lovers, but allows the characters to grow organically as they build a life together and start a family. Evolution reveals new layers of their personalities.
Also, having a protagonist who dwells on both sides of the law allows me to delve deeper into different themes, including crime and punishment, guilt, temptation, injustice, and social mores. As both a writer and a reader, I find few things are as rewarding as when characters find self-awareness through their actions.
Q: Do you know how your novels will end before you start writing, or do you make many changes along the way?
A: I begin by arcing the story out by scenes, but I never let those box me in. They’re moveable road signs. The series has several reoccurring characters whose relationships and dialogue help set the tone and drive the pace.
New characters, whether villain or victim, determine the plot. There’s an old cliché in writing that you never close the door on any character. It’s trite but true. You gotta let ’em run. At the same time, I keep in mind what Faulkner said about killing your darlings.
Q: You've also written short fiction and nonfiction. Do you have a preference?
A: I like both and still do both. Nonfiction certainly works its way into both my short and long fiction. The Jack McCoul series is set in San Francisco and I love to share with readers its colorful history and quirky nature.
Characters, conflicts, and cool stuff inhabit the environmental issues, life sciences, and outdoor adventures I’ve written about, and so I let the natural world be a source and inspiration for stories.
Wildlife, weather, landscape – they all play an integral role in a narrative’s arc and protagonist’s journey, providing action, motivation, and revelation.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Jack, his wife Katie, and buddy Hark still have unfinished business and they’re bringing me along on their latest ride, Shake City. I plan to share the newest caper with readers this spring.
I’m also developing a new collection of short fiction. Most are new pieces; a couple, such as “A Pale Chanting,” have been published previously in literary journals. Nonfiction? There’s a documentary screenplay in the works.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: We’re all storytellers at heart. It’s what defines us as a species. Tell yours, listen to others.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Posted by Deborah Kalb at 7:30 AM
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Quoted in Sidelights: “I’ve always made my living as a writer, if you don’t count the stints working in a body and fender shop and cutting and gutting salmon in Alaska,” he related in an essay on the Story Prize website. “Nonfiction books, newspaper articles, magazine features, special reports, you name it, I’ve written it. Whatever could pay the rent, the trips to distant lands, then the mortgage, the sitters, the tuitions. Well, you get the picture.”
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Dwight Holing Keeps It Real
In the 58th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Dwight Holing, author of California Works (Snake Nation Press), discusses his roundabout path to writing fiction.
Okay, here it is in a rush because I need to get back to work since I came late to short fiction and am trying to make up for time. Notice I didn’t say “lost” because it wasn’t. I just took a roundabout way of getting to it. It’s not like I rolled out of bed in my 50s and suddenly decided to put fingers to keyboard. I’ve always made my living as a writer, if you don’t count the stints working in a body and fender shop and cutting and gutting salmon in Alaska. Nonfiction books, newspaper articles, magazine features, special reports, you name it, I’ve written it. Whatever could pay the rent, the trips to distant lands, then the mortgage, the sitters, the tuitions. Well, you get the picture.
Spare me the cliché that journalism is the world’s second oldest profession and nowhere near as well compensated as the first. There’s plenty of creative juice getting spilled over reporting, whether or not you subscribe to Wolfesonian mau-mauing or Twain’s never letting the facts get in the way. Characters, conflicts, and cool stuff inhabited the environmental issues, life sciences, and outdoor adventures I’ve written about. Some was truly stranger than fiction, and now I’m finding the natural world not only is a source and inspiration for short stories, but helps keep dialogue and settings real. Wildlife, weather, landscape—they all play an integral role in a narrative’s arc and protagonist’s journey, providing action, motivation, revelation, be it a story about a veteran of the Iraq War turned cactus rustler finding peace in a night blooming cholla or a commercial fisherman relying on the rules of the sea to distinguish what he knows and doesn’t after his son drowns and marriage founders.
Chiseled on a tablet somewhere is the adage “write about what you know.” What isn’t carved right alongside it is the answer to “why do you write in the first place?” Though I’ve reported about genetics, I can’t say for certain if there’s any involved in writing. For sure, environment plays a role. It’s the whole nature versus nurture debate all over again. My grandfather was a story teller, penning Jazz Age romances for Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s before getting the call from Hollywood. My mom raised me on a steady diet of what it was like growing up with an itinerant writer for a dad—true life adventures of being chased by bill collectors from one Georgia town to the next while they awaited a check for his latest creation, waking up in their rented California bungalow to find Raymond Chandler passed out on the sofa, his fingers still ensconced in the white gloves he wore the night before while drinking gin and playing poker with a pack of Paramount scribes.
Was it genes or memories that shaped me? Was it just cosmic coincidence that this California writer’s first collection of stories was published by a Georgia-based literary press? Who knows? But what I am certain of is I only have to reach back to what I’ve witnessed and experienced to find the genesis for stories, and then just look and listen all around me for mood, imagery, and voice. I’m not the first to discover nature not only delivers honesty to a well-told tale, but adds punch, no matter the form or genre. Read Chandler’s opener to his short story “Red Wind” and you’ll see what I mean:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Okay, now back to writing fiction. Cheers.
Quoted in Sidelights: “to make decisions now that will bring contentment when looked back
on,” “Holing’s thoughtful, melancholic writing,” “readers of a particular age” a poignant and altogether agreeable sequence of tales.”
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Print Marked Items
Holing, Dwight: OVER OUR HEADS
UNDER OUR FEET
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Holing, Dwight OVER OUR HEADS UNDER OUR FEET Jackdaw Press (Indie Fiction) $8.99 12, 11
ISBN: 978-0-9991468-1-1
A collection of short stories explores a variety of life choices.
The titular story of Holing's (Shake City, 2017, etc.) latest compendium sees a man with early-onset
dementia immerse himself in the seething vitality of the Serengeti. There develops an uneasy to-and-fro
between his knowledge of what awaits him and his memories of married life, both blissful yet incomplete,
the upshot being that fear gives way to wonder. This, in essence, is the theme of the collection: 10 tales
working together to caution readers to make decisions now that will bring contentment when looked back
on later in life. This notion comes to the fore particularly in stories of place, such as "Between Wind and
Water" and "Yellow Dog." In the former, a peripatetic, work-obsessed engineer is posted to Hawaii, where
the laid-back lifestyle gives pause to his wind-swept urgency. In the latter, a young woman breaks off her
relationship and casts off conventional notions of happiness, forging a new life in vibrant, colorful Mexico.
Holing is adroit at hinting at possibilities: nuances of what might or might not happen. These aren't always
resolved--readers expecting twist endings and emotional jolts will be disappointed--but even vignettes such
as the forlorn fisherman's tale "Fish Rap," the bittersweet carjacking story "The Things You Leave Behind,"
and the geologist's contemplative daydream "When Mountains Melt" deftly add to the overall sense of
longing. "Natural Selection," set in a zoo, pits animal instinct against morality, whereas "Thief in the Night"
invokes the cutthroat world of Silicon Valley to suggest that people should stay true to their natures.
"Desperados" contrasts modern transience with bucolic ranch life and the capricious wiles of the California
Gold Rush. "The Test" examines the desperation and sadness of Chinese adoption. In all these wistful
stories, Holing allows room for characterization, often skipping back in time to show aspects of the
protagonist's past. The pacing in most cases is gentle, with the prose an easy mixture of narrative and
description. For readers of a particular age who have made and regretted certain decisions in life, Holing's
thoughtful, melancholic writing should sit nicely.
Yearning rather than bemoaning; a poignant and altogether agreeable sequence of tales.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Holing, Dwight: OVER OUR HEADS UNDER OUR FEET." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248056/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6433a7c1. Accessed 23 June 2018.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “an engrossing novel” “a likable, levelheaded protagonist,” “a fine character” as “a proficient detective story that keeps the plot turning,” “is loaded with dishy one-liners.” “should earn the series a bevy of new fans,”
BAD KARMA
by Dwight Holing
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KIRKUS REVIEW
In Holing’s (A Boatload, 2014, etc.) thriller sequel, an ex-con dabbles in his dormant criminal ways to prove that his wife’s friend is innocent of murder.
These days, reformed grifter Jack McCoul is legit, financing his startup business for an app he’s developing. So he’s understandably perturbed when former partner-in-crime Bobby shows up at his door. Bobby has his eye on Dexter Cotswold; more specifically, Dexter’s solid-gold Buddha, which Jack and Bobby once stole years ago. But when Dexter winds up dead, cops set their sights on his wife, Laura, best friend of Jack’s wife, Katie. Jack is determined to find the real killer, while he watches out for two thuggish investors pursuing his app a bit too aggressively; they may be the ones whose car tried to run down Jack and Katie. To get answers, Jack resorts to his old skills—e.g., breaking and entering. The author’s second novel featuring Jack McCoul is a proficient detective story that keeps the plot turning. Jack’s not a typical PI, but he employs his mastery to great effect; he gets help from less reputable types, like a black hat hacker, and runs a con with pal Hark to get into a private club. He’s a likable, levelheaded protagonist faced with endless hurdles. Lead homicide investigator Terry Dolan, for example, hates Jack simply because Terry is Katie’s ex-fiance, and Jack isn’t sure he can trust Bobby, especially because he disappears after the murder. The story is loaded with dishy one-liners for Jack, but even the third-person narrative gets in on the fun, noting a mysterious driver (from the night of Dexter’s murder) who may live “within honking distance.” Jack’s investigations, be they murder- or app-related, come together seamlessly, as he deals with at least one more dead body, a kidnapping, and the Mumbai mafia. Katie is a fine character, but readers unfortunately see little of the smart and strong-willed woman the story describes. She’s often a mere sidekick and at one point even complains that diligent Jack hasn’t yet managed to get Laura out of jail.
An engrossing novel that should earn the series a bevy of new fans.
Pub Date: May 15th, 2015
ISBN: 978-0991130146
Page count: 274pp
Publisher: Jackdaw Press
Program: Kirkus Indie
Review Posted Online: June 5th, 2015