Host: Doug Wright

Doug: This morning on the program we're going to talk about Spirit of Union. This is Volume Three that will take us from 1919 to 1940, and its called Heritage. Gordon Ryan is back with us. And not only Gordon is here but his wife Colleen is also here. Thank you so much for coming back and joining us on Everyday Lives, Everyday Values.

Gordon: Doug, it's a pleasure to be with you again.

Doug: Colleen, good to have you with us, too.

Colleen: Great to be here, Doug.

Doug: Its always so much fun to see you, both of you this time, you know to walk through the door. Let's talk a little bit about the writing career Gordon. Now, you have been all over the world, you've been in the military, marines, you've worked as a City Manager in Alaska and Washington and even here along the Wasatch Front. I think of this illustrious career of yours, and now writing. Fill in some of the blanks for our listeners who may not have heard some of our previous programs. What brought you to the door of writing?

Gordon: I'm a late learner, Doug. A slow developer I think. Everything in my life has come along a little bit slower than it has for everybody else. I got my college degree ten years after most of my peers by going to night school, and didn't write the first word until I was almost fifty. I'm being a bit flippant with it, but it was an enjoyable experience all along the way and I've always felt that one should never be satisfied with what they have in life, that they should always seek for something else within themselves and see if they can develop a new talent.

Doug: I think of the efforts and the books and the writing that we have talked about in the past. And it was several years ago that we came to this trilogy. But I want to talk about a special book you wrote called Threads of Honor. I've had people come up and say, "We read the book, we actually had him come speak to our group." And I've been pleased enough and proud enough to be able to say, "Hey, I know him."

Gordon: Its been one of the more satisfying aspects with regard to the response that I've received from the public. I mean it was the simplest piece that I wrote, it was completed in the shortest period of time. And the story, being true, was already there. I didn't have to make up much of it. I just put it down on paper and let my heart flow. But its been very satisfying and certainly has engendered a long-standing public speaking career. That's tapered off this last six or eight months, but for a couple of years it was pretty extensive.

Doug: Right. I had a lot of people come up and say that they had heard you speak on that particular book. Six books, now, is that correct? If I'm keeping track?

Gordon: I have five novels, or four hardback novels through Deseret Book. One paperback, Threads of Honor through Deseret Book and one self-published Book of Mormon fiction that my daughter and I wrote together called Upon the Isles of the Sea.

Doug: You were kind enough to give me a copy of that. Which was the most difficult for you to write?

Gordon: Well, I suppose technically the first story, Dangerous Legacy. My first venture into writing, and as we've spoken about before, I am not a journalist or an English major or someone who came up with that as a interest in life. It was a late life understanding that I wanted to do that. So it was difficult in terms of developing the right technical ability to put it together and to put it together in a format that would be grammatically acceptable to the publisher.

Doug: Yeah.

Gordon: There is a great misconception among would-be writers that they can put together this fine, conceptual story and there are people who will correct it with grammar, English, etc. That is not true. That may have been true fifty years ago, but it isn't now. You've got to have it in pretty good shape. But I am very fortunate to have an editor like Richard Peterson at Deseret Book who puts that final flair to it. He knows me well enough now after five books-four books together-he didn't do that first one. He knows me well enough to know what I'm trying to say. And sometimes he will interject himself and say it better knowing fully what I intended to say in the first place.

Doug: Right, right. I'm going to tap into another source here to talk about your works. Colleen, maybe you can tell us: For you, if you had one of Gordon's books that you could take with you, which one would you grab?

Colleen: The second volume of Spirit of Union.

Doug: How come the second volume?

Colleen: I don't know? I read all three, but the second one, I forgot that Gordon had written it. That to me was the reason that it was so special. With the first one I was very aware that he had written it. With the second one it caught my attention and I just completely forgot that Gordon wrote it. With the third one I knew it was winding up and I didn't have as much to do with the reading of excerpts along the way. It was a new story to me, but he did some things to some of the characters that I didn't want him to do.

Doug: We're getting some honesty here. See, I don't often have this opportunity to tap in to someone's spouse sitting right next to them.
Gordon: No, and if I could interject for her, she probably wouldn't take any of the books, Doug. She'd take me because I have many more within me.

Doug: Oh, there you go. That's it. Take the goose that lays the golden eggs, right? Exactly.

Colleen: But if you're asking me which I enjoyed the most, it was the second volume of Spirit of Union.

Doug: Interesting. This is a unique opportunity to be able to tap into the spousal viewpoint on this. Take us back to the first Spirit of Union volume and set the stage and then we can talk a little bit about the second and then we can focus primarily on the third.

Gordon: Right. I think I've mentioned to you before that while I don't use my family's story, I do use my heritage a great deal. And consequently the protagonist or the main male hero in this book is a young Irish fellow running away from a disruptive life and a bit of trouble with the law in Ireland in 1895. He meets a young Norwegian girl with her family coming to America. The Norwegian's are going to Utah as newly baptized Mormons. He is going to New York, the great melting pot where all the Irish went and eventually got jobs building the railroad. The first volume became, although I didn't set out to do so, it became an adventure/romance. We have to get this young couple together in the beginning. And so I came home about two-thirds of the way through that book one night and said to Colleen, "You know, I'm writing a romance." Never thought that would be the case, but indeed that's what it was. They proceed, they do get together, they do marry and form a family. Volume Two is called Conflict. Well, let me back up a moment. Volume One, the series being called Spirit of Union, it was the combination of three things. I was trying to show the union between young Tom Callahan and Katrina Hansen as they came together, a Catholic and a Mormon. I was trying to show at the time the union between the territory of Deseret and the United States of America as Utah became a state in 1896; and third, I was trying to show the forming union between Gentile and Mormon. So there were three controversies raging in the first book. In the second book the primary controversy rages around the family itself where Tom, still a Catholic, and Katrina, a very dedicated Mormon, yet desperately in love with one another, try to find ways to accommodate their religious differences and the path that they're on. I also wanted to show throughout those early volumes, the great impact of non-LDS peoples who lived in this valley at the turn of the century as Utah became a state. We may have been formed and generated by the Mormon exodus that came here in the mid-1800s. But by fifty years later when Utah became a state there were many people and many organizations involved. I also recall telling you that I had selected Holy Cross Hospital, the birthplace of many prominent people in this valley, including yourself, right?

Doug: I was born there, that is right.

Gordon: That's right. To show the impact that they had on the miners and on the valley as a whole. Volume Three, obviously recognizing that it was going to be a conclusive volume, with only three, was a little different in scope. We needed to resolve some of the issues that had developed through the first two volumes. And I'm not going to tell everybody how those were resolved, because I had an awful lot of suggestions from people on how they should resolve. "Don't have Tom do this. Do have Tom do that. Don't have Katrina do this." And so we moved . . . I've got an opening line in the preface to the third volume which says: "Would be to all those readers who wrote to me and spoke to me about it, would be that we could have all sat around a table laden with pizza and worked out the solutions together."

Doug: Yeah, exactly. Now, was it always destined to be a trilogy?

Gordon: Well it was, it was guaranteed to be at least a trilogy. And we talked about that through the time frame. I think that that was a decision that we made along the way and as we entered into Volume Three, I was prepared to wrap it up, to bring the characters to a conclusion. There are multiple series' on the market at present, some that are much longer. Of course, the great and phenomenal Work and the Glory which everyone loves so much, Dean Hughes wonderful series Children of the Promise has been an outstanding success in the market. And I felt that I would be quite content to go do something else. I've got two other novels now that I'll begin shopping in the national market in New York. I think I'll try to move in that direction.

Doug: Interesting. We'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk more with Gordon and Colleen Ryan who are here in studio with us. Spirit of Union, Volume Three. It is here. It will take us from 1919 to 1940. Maybe I can pry a little more information out of Gordon on the volume when we come back on Everyday Lives, Everyday Values.

Doug: Spirit of Union, Volume Three is finally on the bookshelves. Its called Heritage. Gordon Ryan is here along with his wife, Colleen. A little more information, and I don't want to give away anything, but this is quite a span of time, 1919 to 1940, as we conclude this series and we take the story to its conclusion. Can you tell us a little bit more about what we're going to encounter in the travel over these twenty-one years?

Gordon: Well, obviously, Volume Two ends just at the conclusion of World War I and some of the characters in the story begin to form their lives. Certainly Tom and Katrina's children have grown to adulthood, they begin to feel their oats and find their way in society and go in quite disparate paths with regard to how Tom and Katrina think they would have gone. Tom is the president and owner of a very successful bank in Salt Lake City, Utah Trust bank. He wants his sons to come into the business, but they don't. P.J. the oldest son goes down to New Zealand on a mission in 1916 and stays there and marries a beautiful Maori girl and eventually buys a sheep ranch and becomes a successful sheep rancher and cattle rancher in New Zealand. Tom, coming back from, Tommy, his son Tommy coming back from World War I is offered an opportunity to enter the Naval Academy as a young marine officer. Theresa, the young girl, Tommy's twin is a pretty good singer and she feels her oats on the stage and she gets a few good reviews here in Salt Lake City from things she does and she bops off to New York in the early 1920's to hit the stage. And after a number of failures, as they all do paying their dues, she becomes fairly successful at that. And that of course has its setbacks because it puts her in a world very different from the LDS world that she's used to. A pretty worldly place. And of course toward the end of the 1920's Hollywood is really booming and they pull these stage actors and actresses out there and put them in that arena and she has to make some choices, some hard choices in her life. So all of the children go in different directions. Obviously we are ending the story shortly before World War II. And Dean Hughes has covered that era of Salt Lake and Utah history quite well in his series. And so we're not overlapping in that sense. I've, almost all of my stories have a military bent to them somewhere. I served in the military, I'm very proud of that. I'm very supportive of our military throughout the world and I always try to put them in a decent light in these stories. And so I've got young Tommy in the Marine Corps and he's the one that carries on as a Marine Corps officer. And as the book ends, he is a Lieutenant Colonel on attaché duty to the American Embassy in London serving under Joseph Kennedy, who was then the ambassador.

Doug: Right.

Gordon: And some very difficult things happen to him during that time frame. And those, whatever your persuasive powers are, will not be revealed on this program.

Doug: Cannot pry that. Now, of course you realize Gordon that people are going to go, "You know, gosh, we'd like to see this family go through World War II, we'd like to see them go into the brink." Is it ever going to be tempting?

Gordon: Its up to the people and its up to Deseret Book as far as I'm concerned. We have each filled our commitment to the other.

Doug: Right.

Gordon: And it will be determined by Deseret Book and whatever demand may be undeveloped. As I said I have other things that I'm doing at the moment and pretty well completed with two other novels that I'm shopping nationally. But I've had a great deal of enthusiasm and a great deal of joy writing this series. I mean it was, some of the characters are complete and complete themselves in this story. We do have an epilogue that jumps to 1964. So, that would give the readers some hint about what I'm intending to do there, or what I'm doing to wrap up the story.

Doug: Right.

Gordon: Yet there is room, there is room to cover those years and I would love to write about those years. In fact, one of the things I'm doing for the national market is indeed a World War II marines in the Pacific type story, when the first marine division went down into New Zealand in 1942.

Doug: I'm glad you mentioned that. I want to talk about the projects that are designed for the national market here. Again with your military background, with your expertise and your experiences around the world that include New Zealand, and we see New Zealand crop up periodically I notice
.
Gordon: There's a reasonably just cause for that. I'd like to have dinner on the table every night when I go home.

Doug: Exactly.

Gordon: My wife is from New Zealand, we have to have that. Plus, quite frankly, I've fallen in love with the place. It's a marvelous country.

Doug: So tell us a little bit more about this new novel. What will it cover?

Gordon: Well the one that I'm actually working on at the moment is a California story, it's a political suspense story about California.

Doug: So is the other one completed then?

Gordon: Yes, the California story is completed.

Doug: Oh, I see.

Gordon: I've got a little polishing to do. A novel is never completed Doug, even when it goes to the publisher and he sends it to the press, its really not completed. I'd like to change something when I see it. But it's as complete as it's going to be. The historian will know that by 1941 when we suffered the Pearl Harbor disaster and in early 1942 when a worldwide global defense strategy was formulated between Roosevelt, Churchill and those powers. Most of the New Zealand and Australian troops were in North Africa. And rather than bring them home to defend the Pacific, their homeland in the Pacific islands, the Allied strategy was to send the first marine division down to New Zealand when they began the island hopping campaign in August of 1942, by invading Guadalcanal. Now that is a piece of Dean Hughes' story that I will never forgive him for. He has all these characters and all the services, the Army, the Army Air Corps, the young girl is a nurse in the Navy, and he took this poor young Marine and sent him ashore in Guadalcanal and killed him.

Doug: Oh, right off the bat.

Gordon: He was gone almost instantly and I saw Dean one day at a signing and I said, "Why couldn't you kill that Army guy?"

Doug: Leave the Marine.

Gordon: Leave the Marine alive.

Doug: That's great. Colleen, when Gordon writes, I know what his day job is and I know how demanding that is. And I can only imagine what it must be like to write three volumes of this size. When in the world, how in the world does he write?

Colleen: He gets up very, very early in the morning and tries not to disturb me. And I leave him in the study. He's writing before he goes to work. When I get home, I don't get home until 6:30 because I work downtown here, he's already been home and writing for an hour and a half when I get home. So it doesn't really take any time from us. But there is a lot of effort that goes into it and it has to be uninterrupted. Because if you go in there with little interruptions, it interrupts the creative train of thought.

Doug: Is writing difficult or is it hard for you?

Gordon: Yes and yes. I mean, you've been in the creative endeavor yourself. There are days, Doug, when everything I want to say just flows right out and the characters are right in sync. And there are days when I don't even have a clue who they are or what they're thinking about. So its just a, it's a process. I have learned one thing certain. Its almost like the homework analogy from college. For every hour I spend at the keyboard, there are two hours of mentality that have gone into this; maybe while I'm having lunch, while I'm driving the car, while I'm moving around. Thinking process, its roughly two to one, is what I've come up with. For every hour at the keyboard, I'm thinking about it for two hours the day before or some other time. And there are those unusual days when I simply cannot either get to sleep or I wake up even earlier and can't get back to sleep because some idea has grabbed me and I'm stuck with it.

Doug: Yeah.

Gordon: But its been a wonderful experience. I mean sleep is something overrated, I suppose. I hate rolling out of bed, but I love being up, if that correlates?

Doug: I know exactly what you mean. I've seen very few early sunrises in my life, but when I do I love it. But I hate the effort to get there.

Gordon: Absolutely. And that's kind of how I feel when I hit the keyboard in the morning. And Colleen has been so supportive in that regard, because it is difficult. You'd like to pop in and say, "Oh listen, could you stop by the laundry and pick up those shirts tonight?" And she foregoes that opportunity, knowing that I may or may not be in a flow of something.

Doug: Right, right.

Gordon: And so we've developed this routine where we try not to disturb one another.

Doug: The title of this new book is called Heritage. Spirit of Union, its Volume Three in this series. It covers the time period from 1919 to 1940. Gordon Ryan, of course the author, and his wife Colleen are with us. What a great pleasure to have you both in studio. Its always so much fun. I always love when I get word from Deseret Book that we have another interview scheduled, another book is coming out. And I'm anxious for the next one, whatever it may be.

Gordon: Appreciate that very much Doug. You've been a wonderful person to come and interview with. You always, as I've said before, make each author feel like they're the only one who writes.

Doug: That's nice of you to say. Colleen, too, thank you for being here.