Meet AWC Historian Dean Bonner

As an all-volunteer group, the AWC Board wants members to get to know those who represent them and help manage the logistics of this organization. This is part of series in which AWC Board members interview themselves. We hope you enjoy it.

Hi Dean Bonner. What kinds of things do you write?

Mostly humor and memoir, but I write a little poetry when it strikes me.  I can’t force poems-- they arrive suddenly and infrequently.

How do you write?

It’s 90 percent subconscious.  I’ll take a one-line idea and do my normal routine of swinging a hammer and such while stories write themselves.  Occasionally an item needing sorting out surfaces while I work, shop, et cetera: “Use this phrase; delete that, move that idea up/down in the order of the story.”  When I sit down at the keyboard or typewriter, it’s largely just typing up the story.  I’ll do two or three rounds of editing afterwards, but I seldom change much of the material. 

What prompted you to write?

It was an outlet in school, where I was bullied for years.  I got praise for my rudimentary efforts.  Then I didn’t write anything for years, until my college work and job required it.  But those honed my skills in writing condensed stories.  Especially writing intelligence briefings and analyses.

But why I got serious with my writing was largely to preserve a lot of family stories so they wouldn’t be lost forever.  That became the book, which led to a newspaper column and magazine work, and a lot of other things that followed. 

What is your latest effort?

Well, there are two. I got a television development contract from an LA producer I met at an Albertville, Alabama book event put on my now-defunct PDMI Publishing.  Where my original memoir collection is largely humorous, with the darker side of it being the deafening silence of what is left unsaid, the TV material puts both the humorous side and dark side right out there in a sort of Southern Gothic dark comedy.  

The TV project has a working title of Tar Nation, based on my book I Talk Slower Than I Think.  I cowrote the pilot screenplay with a magnificent writer, Heidi Carroll.  Our plans to shop it around some more were put on hold when some major film conferences were cancelled by COVID.  But the pilot placing as a Second Rounder / quarterfinalist in the 2019 Austin Film Festival should give it a boost, once we can pitch it in person again.

The second project is called NC-34.  It’s an audio show in a sort of Burns and Allen format.  It weaves the tidbits of random humor that my brain spits out daily into a show that is set in the living room and kitchen of a middle-aged couple who have odd friends, neighbors, and relatives. 

Is it odd to interview yourself?

Not really.  I talk to myself sometimes, and I win most of the ensuing arguments. 

What is the best way to make your garden, or yourself, grow?

With the help of detractors.