An Interview with Ethan Hirsh

Writer and photographer Ethan Hirsh served four years as an air traffic control officer in the United States Air Force, then worked as a wordsmith and communications strategist in Houston and Kansas City for more than thirty years. His corporate specialties included annual shareholder reports and branding. He has degrees in English and business. Now starting a third decade of “retirement,” he spends much of his time with his wife, JoEl, tending their nature preserve in the Missouri Ozarks. An amateur naturalist, Ethan publishes a photo blog several times a year.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

I settled on the title, My Search for Jazzbo Jones, early in the process. The whole book revolves around solving a mystery about how my college friend lost his sight in a racing accident. The subtitle came to me later as a way to capture the wide-ranging, but more focused than meandering, scope of this memoir. I wanted to play up the memoir-writing process which, if pursued vigorously, can lead to many surprising detours and discoveries along the way.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

In the Acknowledgments section of the book, I mention an eighth-grade English teacher who encouraged my creativity. I majored in English in college.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

After military service, writing was a major part of my thirty-two-year corporate career. Now, finally, I get to write what really interests me. For my first book, I revisited my thesis in literary criticism fifty years after its acceptance and wrote an updated version. I’m proud that the 105-page perfect-bound book is not only on Amazon. It’s also on the shelf of my university’s library, next to the original document cataloged in 1967.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Fleshing out details surrounding experiences I had over seven decades and getting to share details from my life, particularly those that I easily developed into hilarious (but still true) stories. The more serious goal was to shine a light on the colorful and inspiring attributes of a lost friend who met and overcame daunting challenges in his life.

The exciting part of the publishing process was refining a fairly polished complete draft into a really polished final manuscript. Atmosphere’s editor, proofreaders, and cold reader all worked to make the book an even better product.

One reader said my openness and my remarks about the memoir-writing process immediately led him to look at his own life experiences in new ways. To me that was a home run.

Another point – My editor said he wasn’t alive during half the period covered in the book, so its historical sections were especially enlightening to him because they were events he hadn’t experienced himself. This comment gave the book added purpose. There’s a lot of history some of us take for granted that still needs to be shared with younger generations.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

There actually are some songs in the book! One of them is an extreme version of “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” A verse or two even shows up in the audiobook, performed by the narrator! A few other songs appear but I don’t want to give them away in spoilers.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I weave a lot of cultural and political history into my story, so the “perfect reader” would appreciate seeing the broader context of the world we lived in during the 1950s and 60s as well as the closer focus on the very personal experiences of myself and my long-lost friend whose earlier and later life I researched for thirteen years. It also wouldn’t hurt to be pretty broad-minded.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I cut several chapters from My Search for Jazzbo Jones because they weren’t closely enough related to the main theme. I was also way over 120,000 words! These are percolating in a drawer, just waiting to hatch in some new form. The genre would be a combination of memoir and true crime. (I didn’t do it!)

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

Atmosphere Press has all the bases covered, but you may need to slow down your expectations about schedule. Publishing is a slow and meticulous process. It’s worth the wait if you want to publish with the highest quality possible. They even had me hold back on the release date to reach the book market at an optimal time of year. It all worked out.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.