Meet Craig E. Higgins

We recently connected with Craig E. Higgins and have shared our conversation below.

Craig E. , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I grew up in a different era that lent itself to developing survival skills in an environment fraught with temptation and occasional danger. Arriving at age nineteen in New Orleans’s French Quarter in the late 1980s exposed me to an international crowd of people from all walks of life, and not all of them were nice people: I got beaten up once in a housing project, then was held up at gunpoint a few years later. Through all this time I bussed tables in restaurants to support myself, which meant a lot of late hours, alcohol, and copious amounts of second-hand cigarette smoke. I learned pretty quickly to size up who might be a friend, or a threat, or someone who might jack my wallet if I wasn’t looking. And I guess about five years of that sort of thing toughened me up a bit because quite a few of that old crowd died early.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I write YA sci-fi/fantasy stories that combine elements of my personal experiences as a New Orleans native and traveler throughout the American Southwest with my all-abiding fascination in topics as disparate as Bronze Age comics, Robert E. Howard-style pulp fiction and, of late, pirates; lots and lots of pirates. One thing that stands out about my writing background is my substantive background in the physical sciences: I hold two Masters degrees in Physics, and try to weave that fundamental understanding of the nature of reality into every work I write.

My books are exciting because I place the reader in the cockpit of the protagonist’s brain, driving them along on adventures that take place on Earth or planetoids behind the dark side of the Moon or whatever lies behind the universal veil of dark matter. To paraphrase Stan Lee, the cosmos beckons in my fiction, and with courage we shall find it together.

As of this writing I’m in the second draft of a YA fantasy story about a troubled young man who lands on a strange world where he must team up with an unusual pirate to navigate its murderous politics, mysterious islands, and other dangers. Along the way he perhaps even finds love, which often seems to be the rarest element in the universe.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three qualities or areas of knowledge that have had the biggest impact on my writing would be my science background, time spent living in different parts of the American Southwest, and the imprint of my hometown of New Orleans on my psyche. It helps to know something about science if you’re going to write anything to do with science fiction, both in terms of the foundational knowledge you can call to the fore when writing but also because writing actual scientific papers means you’ve literally done the homework, sometimes to an excruciating degree. I’m grateful for having grown up in such a place as New Orleans both because of the city’s rich cultural history but also the impact living in and around the French Quarter had on my understanding of different cultures and different groups of people. And getting out of that bubble – living in Texas and rural Nevada – provided me with an opportunity to experience life in a place where I was by definition an outsider and had to learn to adapt to whatever circumstances I found myself in.

So, my advice to any aspiring writer would be to get outside your comfort zone – whether it’s through the military or the Peace Corps or, on a whim, packing the car and moving to a wholly different state, get out and explore the world. Be the adventurer. Your writing, whatever that is, will thank you for it.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

I think the book that influenced me most was Theodore Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’, which I read in high school. That’s a Naturalist novel about a middle-class financial nobody who meets and runs off with Carrie, who’s this young would-be actress with a moral compass mostly skewed toward what was good for Carrie. In the end the guy’s life falls apart while the girl achieves all the material things she wants in life, a complete upheaval of the expected moral punishment a character like this would ordinarily suffer in a novel written in the late nineteenth century. But I was impressed by the pitilessness of Dreiser’s writing, his innate understanding of human selfishness and ruthlessness in the face of adversity. We’d all like every story to have a happy ending but in life that’s not always true; Dreiser understood this, and wrote his novels accordingly.

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Image Credits

Headshots by Terje Riisnaes. All other photos by Craig E. Higgins.

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