Samuel:   Buras is a small community sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. The Gulf waters in this area are rich in seafood and oil producing wells. Ships from all over the world travel up the river to New Orleans, and at night I often listened to the throb of their engines. Fog was a ghost that often moved along the seemingly endless miles of river levee. The smells and sounds of the sea and the river were ever present. It was a magical place.
 

Kristie:   You now make your home in Wiggins, Mississippi. I used to live in Mobile, Alabama which is very near Wiggins so I have been through there many times and am somewhat familiar with the town. Your friends and neighbors in Wiggins probably think that you are a strange fellow indeed for writing novels but especially for writing romance novels. Tell me some of the comments you have had from the people in Wiggins, both positive and negative, about your career as a writer.

Samuel:   Wiggins, as a whole, is a rather conservative community. My first published novel explored an interracial relationship. But it is a lot more than that. It's about respect between two people who lived next door to each other and played together as children, and later became attracted to one another. "Since when do Souls have color?” But a lot of people can't go there. I think they don't know what to make of my writing or me.
 

Kristie:   You have worked as an oyster fisherman which in nothing strange in itself because of the area that you grew up in. You have also worked in the oilfield as a derrick hand and also as a supervisor on an offshore gas production platform. I have been around construction workers for many years as my husband is in construction too.  Does your fellow workers tease you about your writing career? How did you make the leap from this type work to writing?

Samuel:  My fellow workers have never teased me. They are aware that there are many sides to my character. They have always respected me because I respect them. They know they can turn to me for most anything and I will help them in some way. I have always written. I have worked only to earn a living.
 

Kristie:  In I LOVE YOU, your description of a hurricane is so realistic that I just know you have lived through being in a hurricane. I too have been through hurricanes – Hurricane Frederick that hit Mobile, Alabama when I was living there comes to mind. What hurricanes have you lived through?

Samuel:   When I was a kid, we lived in a two-room shack without running water or electricity. During Hurricane Flossy, it rained so much we had four inches of rainwater in our house. We stayed there until the eye was overhead, and in that brief period of calm, we ran to my Uncle’s house. Years later when the 150 mile an hour winds of Hurricane Betsy struck, the sea topped the river levee. The house we were living in at the time broke in half.  My family and I had left the house for a stronger one next door only a short time before. The following day I helped carry bodies to be loaded on a boat on the river to be taken to New Orleans. All of the land was under water.
 

Kristie: Can you tell me how you can up with the story idea for I LOVE YOU?

Samuel: There's a beautiful sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay that reads, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why I have forgotten, and what arms have lain under my head till morning." An older woman is sitting listening to rain strike against a window and reminiscing about her lost youth. It closes with, "I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me a little while, that in me sings no more." All of us are looking for those lost summers. It was an easy story to write.
 

Kristie:  Samuel, tell me about your first novel, GOING HOME.

Samuel:   Going Home, is actually the third novel that I wrote, but the first to be published. The story has this metaphysical thread that runs throughout it. A young black woman who has cancer joins a childhood friend at a beach house. He tells her that God is a healing presence that lives within her. For her to sit quietly and listen to the wash of the sea. That every day, in every way, she is better and better. Both of them have a brother involved with selling drugs. He tells her that she can escape the cycle of violence her brother has brought upon her family. But in the end, she cannot.

 
Kristie: What are you working on now?

Samuel:  Two women and a man are thrown together as the result of a tropical storm. One of the women has contracted AIDS. The man gives them a card that reads, "Blue Angel, for all of your Spiritual needs." They begin a Spiritual journey. A search for a cure, for love in their lives - a search for an elusive God. Thus the title, Blue Angel.
 
 

Kristie:  When I first began my writing career, I thought that the actual writing of the novels would be the hard part of the writing business. I have since discovered that the actual writing was the easiest part and that the marketing side of publishing was the really hard part. Marketing of my novels takes up a lot of my time and takes away from my writing. Is this true with you too? If so, how do you handle making time to write but do promotional work as well?

Samuel:   I have three unpublished novels that I have written over the span of my life, but I don't find time to write anymore. Between trying to earn a living and promoting my two published books, there is no time to write. It's very depressing. I'm so long away from my writing that when I do get back to it, I struggle and my writing suffers for it.
 

Kristie:  Samuel, from one published author to another, have you had many negative comments about you and your writing? I know that I have. I was curious as to how you handle this if it has happened to you too.

Samuel: I try not to worry about what others say. I have been told that my books are short. My response has always been that there was nothing else to add to the story. There's a deep Intelligence that guides all of us. I always ask for guidance with my writing. I refuse to lengthen a book just to make it more commercially appealing. I refuse to cheat the reader, or myself.
 

Kristie: Thank you so much, Samuel, for taking the time to talk with me. I wish you the best in your writing career. Is there anything that you would like to add?

Samuel:   Only that I am grateful to you, Kristie, and to other reviewers like yourself that do such a fine job and render a service not only to fellow writers, but to the reading public. I thank you for that. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to read your very original novel, Desert Triangle.
 

There is an old saying – ‘Good things come in small packages’. Such is the case in the novel, I LOVE YOU, by Samuel Alesich.  It is not a long book but it packs a powerful punch beginning with the very first page. I was immediately immersed in the eye of a hurricane, with words and description so realistic that I could feel the powerful winds blowing around the house and the rain pelting down on the roof.

I LOVE YOU is the story of Linda, a lovely but lonely woman in search of herself and all that she had lost and hoped to somehow find again. I found myself becoming Linda as I read this powerful novel. I cried with her; I rejoiced with her; I urged her on to find peace within herself.

Samuel Alesich is a name that I feel we will be hearing from again and again – I hope. It is very unusual to find a man who writes romance with such sensitivity and emotion. His Southern style of writing has found a place in my heart. I highly recommend not only I LOVE YOU but also any future books he decides to write. In my opinion, Samuel Alesich is a true and gifted writer.
 
 
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Kristie Leigh Maguire is the author of Emails from the Edge (The Life of an Expatriate Wife) and Desert Triangle Co-author (with Mark Haeuser) of No Lady and Her Tramp Contributor to Calliope’s Mousepad: Women Writers Online.